directly under the Earth's sun ... now

Cappadocia - Day Two

2012-01-12T12:03:00.012-05:00

And here are photos from our second day in Cappadocia:

I think they're supposed to be chickens or something, even though they look exactly like dinosaurs to me.

There are a bunch of underground cities in the area. The one we visited went 8 stories underground. There was a tunnel which connected it to a neighboring underground city, 9 km away. The first rooms and levels in the city were dug out a long time ago, maybe 8th century BC. In the 6th and 7th century AD, tens of thousands of Christians lived in the cities for months at a time -- as a place of refuge from persecution. Obviously, the lighting isn't great down there which made it difficult to photograph.

That's all for awesome pictures, although I have one more post about the trip in my back pocket.

Cappadocia - Day One

2012-01-09T13:18:00.024-05:00

There really isn't much I could write about Cappadocia that isn't better conveyed in photographs. All these photos were taken in one day.

The striking rock formations which look rather mushroom-like are known as 'fairy chimneys.'

The Göreme Open-Air Museum is a Byzantine monastic settlement with a cluster of rock-cut churches. You can go into a bunch of the churches which have red-colored religious designs (i.e., crosses) and heavily damaged biblically-themed frescos that are difficult to photograph in the gloom.

Cut into the rock in the photo below, you can see part of a church. From that point, there's an entrance to the "Dark Church." Inside, very well preserved frescos are on every surface. There's no photography in there, and, of course, it costs extra. (Pay the extra!)

Did I crawl into that crevice? I can't remember. I suspect not even though I'm sure it goes through. It's not in the US, so scrambling up, on, along, and through (some very dark tunnels) with no safety precautions is almost always allowed.

Cappadocia - Göreme and Logistics

2012-01-03T15:39:00.011-05:00

Sean and I saw Cappadocia on a travel show a couple years ago. It looked incredible. Try Google image searching 'cappadocia' right now: it's full of crazy scenery. But we were both like 'we're never going to go there.' It's too far off the beaten path and there's a lot of cool places we need to see first. But once you're in Turkey, it's not that hard to get to. And it looks just like the pictures.

These are just the views around our hotel, so nothing really cool.

To get to Cappadocia, we flew from Izmir back to Istanbul and out again to Kayseri. Then, a van from the hotel picked us up and took us the 1 hour drive to Göreme. The area around the airport was all golden color fields and mountains. And the roads are pristine-ly new but with very few cars. It was like being in the Central Asian Steppe, if I actually had any idea what that is like.

Three volcanos ring Cappadocia and erosion of the layers of volcanic ash is the cause of the crazy rock formations you see in the area. The things to see are the scenery, the Byzantine churches in caves cut into the rock, and the underground cities. Taking a hot air balloon ride is very popular and must be spectacular, but you do have to get up at 4 for the sunrise flight and we opted to skip that.

We stayed in Göreme, which is basically a backpacker town. If you're looking for a more upscale vacation, you might prefer to stay in some neighboring town. We stayed at the Kelebek hotel, which is one of the original cave hotels. We took the cheapest room with a private bath, but, be warned, those rooms have windows out on the path between the entrance and the restaurant and people outside will wake you several times a night.

Two things about traveling in Turkey. We had fairly good (and free) wifi in our room at every hotel we stayed at, which is better than you could expect in the U.S. or in Europe. We also had tiny bathrooms in every hotel except at Kelebek. In a room carved into rock we had a fabulously large shower.

Finally, remember what I said about every tour having 'shopping stops?' Well, we pre-booked with a reputable company in Cappadocia, and it was fine. But what isn't mentioned in the guide books or even on the tour company websites -- and would have definitely swayed our choice -- is that Heritage Travel (which operates out the Kelebek) doesn't have shopping stops. You'd think they'd advertise that fact more.

Priene, Miletus, and Didyma

2011-12-28T14:20:00.000-05:00

When touring the area, the stops of Priene, Miletus, and Didyma and are usually lumped together in one day -- a "PMD" tour.

Priene:

The scattered column pieces of the Temple of Athena lie all over the place and piled down the slope where they fell during an earthquake.

'Look at the size of those columns!' is what we said when we saw this place. Our tour guide replied, 'just wait until the end of the day.'

The lion-footed seat in the front of this theater was for VIPs. Naturally, we sat it in (surprisingly comfortable!) and took pictures:

Miletus:

The thing to see in Miletus (once a pretty important city and the archeology museum in Istanbul is full of statues from here) is the theater:

Gladiators fighting:

Griffins:

Here's a graffiti death threat to the builder of the theater for stiffing the workers.

Didyma:

The Temple of Apollo was the second largest temple in the ancient world (just a bit smaller than the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus). A modern town was built right around the temple -- we had lunch across the street. This is what the site would look like from the air (yes, we took a picture of a picture):

The inside of the roof of the temple was once covered with these griffin decorations:

And for scale:

We flew out of Izmir the following morning. Just in time, it seems, since this is what we saw when we woke up: a cruise ship in port.

Ephesus

2011-12-27T13:03:00.003-05:00

Ephesus is the most popular destination in the region. At one point 250,000 people lived there. On a busy day, 3 cruise ships, or tens of thousands of tourists, visit the site, and the road in the picture below would be packed shoulder to shoulder. Thankfully, we visited after the peak tourist season and there were no boats in port.

A backgammon board:

Nike:

The figure at the top of the gate is a Medusa. There are Medusas and evil eyes everywhere in Turkey.

Public toilets:

At a lot of the tourist sites in Turkey, there is the option to pay extra (buy another ticket) to see some small portion of the place. The temptation might be to say 'I just paid X to see this, why should I pay X more just for this one thing.' In every case, it was totally worth it to pay extra. Always pay the extra. At Ephesus, the extra ticket gets you in to see the terrace houses. While the rest of the site shows you the public places -- the theater, the baths, the temples, and the library -- the terrace houses show where people, well the very rich, actually lived. Even better, there is a very large structure built over the whole site (the ruins of 7 or so houses), so you'll be in the shade.

In ancient time, the most famous building in Ephesus was the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Nowadays, the most famous sight is the Library of Celsus:

The Theater:

Ephesus was also one of the seven churches of Asia and associated with John the Apostle. In the 19th century, a German nun reported a vision of the house John had built in Ephesus for Mary, the mother of Jesus, including a number of detail about the location of the house. Based on the description, a French priest went to Turkey and found the ruins of a house on a mountaintop near Ephesus. The ruins have been restored and the house is now known as the house of the Virgin Mary and is a big tourist attraction.

Nearly every tour includes a 'shopping stop' on the itinerary. That means we ended up looking at leather coats, onyx and turquoise jewelry, and ceramics. Mostly it's useless filler time. On the day we went to Ephesus, we went to a carpet co-op. Everyone in Turkey asks every visitor (constantly) if they're planning on buying a carpet. For the first week, we always replied 'no way, carpets are expensive.' But, in the end, we did. At the carpet co-op we visited, the government teaches rural women to weave carpets in traditional styles, and we might hope that the money we spent went to the weaver and not middle men. It's a pretty carpet.

Pergamon

2011-12-15T15:15:00.000-05:00

After Istanbul, Sean and I flew to Izmir on the Western coast of Turkey, next to the Aegean Sea. That region is full of Greek and Roman era ruins. The most well-known spot is Ephesus, a popular stop for cruise ships. To make things easier for ourselves, we'd hired a tour guide for the few days we were in the area and who also arranged for transport and hotel. On the first day, we went to Bergama, where the ancient city of Pergamum is located.

When visiting one of these ancient ruins, the thing to realize is that every single one of them used to be a port city, but now the water has receded from the rocky acropolis. It will be unbearable hot and sunny and, since it's a ruin, there's no shade. And no water. And no toilets. So even though it's totally awesome, you can't stay and linger as you might wish to.

Pergamum is not one of most popular sites, but I had been to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, so I figured I'd better see where all that stuff actually came from.

This is the Temple of Trajan.

And this is the theater they built into the hillside. It is incredibly steep.

And this is where the Altar of Zeus used to be. Here is where they reconstructed it in Berlin.

Pergamum is also where the Asclepion was -- ancient Rome's greatest medical center. The acropolis is at the top of the pic, the road to the Asclepion is in the foreground.

A little theater, and all the benches have lion feet.

A tunnel. By the way, they built the hospital here because of a natural spring source. I tried the water; it was fine.

The intertwined snake symbol of medicine.

Greek and Latin writing on lots of stuff.

It may be hard to see in this pic, but there are terra cotta water pipes in that wall. All the ancient cities used such pipes in their water systems. And there are shards of them under every one of your footsteps when you're there.

By the way, when they named our hotel, the Seaview Hotel, they weren't kidding:

Dondurma

2011-11-28T15:03:00.006-05:00

Still working on the non-Istanbul parts of my trip, but I realized that I forgot to mention the turkish ice cream, Dondurma. There are stands all over the tourist sites in Istanbul manned by guys with red vests and caps who churn the ice cream all day long. The ice cream is yummy, but, most notably, it's chewy, with the texture of those big pink bubble gums from when we were kids (was it Bubblicious?). The more you know ...

Istanbul Redux: The Grand Bazaar, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, Tea and Doughnuts

2011-11-11T10:41:00.000-05:00

After the first week in Turkey, we left Istanbul for the Aegean coast and then Cappadocia. But we had to go back to Istanbul for a couple of days before leaving the country. On the return visit, we stopped by the Grand Bazaar, built in the 1450s.

The sellers weren't nearly as aggressive as I expected -- which was both relieving and a little disappointing.

We also went to the Istanbul Archeology Musuems. The highlights there are several giant sarcophagi dating from the late 4th century BC and discovered in Sidon, Lebanon. The most famous is called the Alexander Sarcophagus, which depicts Alexander fighting the Persians.

That's 4th century BC paint!

This one is the Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women. Look at their faces.

We visited Turkey during Ramadan, which we were worried would be odd or awkward but was actually totally awesome. Every evening, the Hippodrome would fill with families picnicking. There was a stage for musical acts and a little Ramadan bazaar with stalls selling food or arts and crafts. The atmosphere was like the 4th of July (including people selling light-up toys for kids) every night.

At the Ramadan bazaar, there was a stall which sold these honeyed doughnuts.

They look like those honey doughnuts you get at Indian restaurants (which I do not like), but instead of being soft and mealy (I'm sure fans of them probably describe them as 'gooey' and not mealy) they have a crunchy shell and in the inside has the texture of youtiao. We got them nearly every night.

And some random assortment of observations that might be helpful to tourists:

We didn't really have any language problems -- everywhere we went people had at least sufficient English for us to get by.

At restaurants, the waiters were generally friendly and nice and surprisingly flirty when Sean wasn't around.

People don't really drink Turkish coffee in Turkey. Instead, tea is the drink of choice -- anytime and all the time. When confronted with a set-up like this

the top pot contains concentrated tea and the bottom pot has hot water. Use the hot water to rinse your glass, then fill it 50% (maybe 30% is better) full of the concentrated tea. Fill to top with hot water. Add sugar to taste.

There are a lot of stray or semi-stray animals in Turkey. Not as many stray dogs as you might expect, and the ones I saw seemed docile if mangy. But all over Istanbul there were tons of cats and kittens. Waiters at outdoor cafes were constantly trying to shoo them away. They didn't look mangy or feral, so I suspect most of them had some person taking care of them at least occasionally.

Finally, and I don't think there's any way to say this without sounding condescending even though I don't mean it to be, but Turkey was way cleaner than I anticipated. Far cleaner than Taiwan, likely cleaner than the US, not quite German levels of clean. In particular, the public toilets were very clean and maintained and I only had to use a squat toilet once or twice during the whole trip.

By the way, this isn't the end of my Turkey blogging, I have more posts to come on the Aegean coast and Cappadocia.

The Spice Market, the Bosphorous, Fish Bread, the Hamam, and the Great Palace Mosaic Museum

2011-11-10T13:38:00.038-05:00

After the first few days in Istanbul, I thought that in the end Turkey would be an interesting place to visit but I wouldn't really like it. It was too hot with too many tour buses and tourists. (Truthfully, even though there were a lot of tourists, there weren't any really long lines to get in to see the sights. It wasn't like going to Versailles; the most we waited was about 20 minutes.) Anyway, the weather got a little better, and Istanbul starts to grow on you after a relaxing afternoon or two of sipping tea and sharing a nargile.

In our last couple of days in Istanbul, we went to the spice market,

which is near where we caught a 90 minute Bosphorus cruise.

There are lot of palaces along the way.

And the awesome looking Rumeli Fortress. It's giant and appeared to have all of 4 tourists inside, but it's so far from the normal tourist spots.

Next to the Galata Bridge, not far from the spice market and not far from where we caught the boat, there are 3 boats that sell 'fish bread.'

The boats rock back and forth to nearly 45 degree angles, but that doesn't faze the guys on board who are constantly grilling fresh fish. Toss a fish in some bread with some lettuce and onions and hand it off to the customer on land for 4 TL (a little more than 2 USD). On land, some guys sell drinks, and there are some scattered stools and tables with lemon juice and salt to put on your sandwiches. They taste awesome.

In terms of activities to do, going to the hamam (Turkish bath) may be the most popular, aside from buying a carpet (people in Turkey will constantly ask you if you're going to buy a carpet or ask you to come see their carpet store). We went to Cemberlitas Hamam, which is in a historic (1500s) building and has nice but separate women's and men's baths and caters to tourists (so no one minds that you have no idea what to do or where to go). In the bath, you relax on a heated marble slab and then some old woman (or man, in the men's section) scrubs you down. Sean had an awesome time, but from his description of his experience, I think that maybe the women's experience is watered down: not as hot, less crazy scrubbing, no massaging component. On the other hand, the women's section had an awesome room with hot and cool water pools to hang out in.

The Great Palace of Constantinople once stood (AD 330 to 1081) where the Blue Mosque now stands. Excavations in the 1930s and 1950s uncovered some of the mosaics which decorated one of the courts and date to the 500s. It's giant:

Here's an elephant strangling a lion:

And here's a monkey catching birds. Awesome!

Even though there's a walkway to keep the tourists off the mosaic, the janitor can just stroll on them to clean to walkway railing.

Topkapi Palace

2011-10-26T14:39:00.023-04:00

The Topkapi Palace is where the Ottoman Sultans lived. And what's this?

This is a blurry photo of the Topkapi Dagger, one of the most famous pieces in its Treasury. Sean saw a picture of it in a book when he was a kid (here's a not bad photo of it) and was fascinated. So even though no photos are allowed, he tried to sneak a pic.

Here are some of the outside bits. The palace is made up of a series of courtyards, each more secluded from the public.

Of course, if you're the Sultan, you build your palace with a nice view.

And with lots of nice stuff inside. In addition to the Treasury, where I saw more emeralds that were larger than a fist -- and not my fist, my hand is tiny, but like a giant's fist -- than I imagined existed in the world, we also saw the Harem (the private apartment for the Sultan's mother, his wives, his concubines, and his children and where the battery on Sean's camera died), and the sacred relics ("in this case is Moses's staff" uh-huh).

Aya Sofia

2011-10-08T12:03:00.022-04:00

The Aya Sofia was built in 537.

It's been a church, a mosque, and since 1935 a museum. This is what it looks like inside. It's ginormous.

Here's a mosaic of Madonna and Child juxtaposed with the minbar.

This is the Omphalion, the spot where emperors were coronated.

This column is very crooked, most likely because it is very old and there are earthquakes in Turkey.

Crosses can be seen through the geometric designs put over them.

The dome.

The walls have crazy, symmetric marble designs.

There are a lot of mosaics. In this first one, the Empress Zoe is depicted to the right of Christ and her husband to the left. As she had three husbands, they just scraped off the old head and put up a new one each time.

Outside the Aya Sofia but in the same complex, there are the tombs of five sultans. I think this one was my favorite.

The Hippodrome, the Blue Mosque, and the Basilica Cistern

2011-09-25T17:46:00.025-04:00

In Istanbul, we stayed in the historic area of Sultanahmet where the most famous tourist spots are. In AD 330, Istanbul -- then Constantinople -- was the capital of the Roman / Byzantine Empire and the Great Palace of Constantinople stood next to the Hippodrome -- the stadium for horse and chariot racing. The palace is almost entirely gone; the Blue Mosque now sits on that site, but the Hippodrome is still there. They've paved the old racetrack and the surface is several feet above the surface in ancient times. There are three monuments in the Hippodrome. One was erected in the 10th century and was covered in scaffolding when we visited. The other two were were brought to the Hippodrome and erected in the 4th century AD as relics of the ancient world. One of them is the Obelisk of Theodosius:

It's from ancient Eygpt -- 1490 BC. The other is the Serpent Column. It once was 8 meters tall, with 3 serpent heads supporting a golden bowl and was created to commemorate the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. One of the serpent heads is displayed in the istanbul Archaeology Musuem, but this is all that remains at the Hippodrome:

Next to the Hippodrome is the Blue Mosque, built in the early 1600s and so named for the blue tiles in the interior.

Next to the mosque (on the same grounds) is the tomb of Ahmed I.

Underneath Sultanahmet is the Basilica Cistern, dating to the 6th century. It's huge with columns everywhere. And a nice escape from the heat. At the back, there are two Medusa heads used a column bases and clearly taken from some other location and brought there for unknown reasons.

Flying to Turkey

2011-09-12T11:49:00.005-04:00

Sean and I took 1200 photos in Turkey. So it'll take a while to sort through them and write blog posts. Anyway, Sean bought my ticket to Turkey on miles and all he could get was business class. It was glorious (yes, I had lie-flat seats). This is my lunch on the Munich-Istanbul flight:

From top-left, it is masarpone and rosewater mousse; salmon with arugula butter; duck confit, smoked duck, and chicken liver creme fraiche; and sbrinz cheese and roquefort.

Not Stranded

2011-08-30T10:51:00.002-04:00

Sean and I went to Turkey for two weeks. It was awesome and I'll try to work up some blog posts with pics in the next week. We were supposed to fly back Sunday. With the whole hurricane thing, we tried twice to change our flight but no one would let us change unless our flight got canceled. When the flight was finally canceled, we spent 3 hours trying to call the airline -- never reaching a human being -- before deciding to go to the airport. There, it only took 15 minutes to rebook us on a different airline for Monday, although it was a 1 hour train ride to the airport. Unbelievable that in this day and age, going physically to the airport is still the most effective thing to do.

I have a whole bit to write about the actual trip back, but I'll save all but the punchline for another post: we made it back but our luggage did not.

New Apartment

2011-08-08T12:12:00.006-04:00

No pictures yet of our new place in Cambridge, but here I am, blogging from my very own balcony, and it is glorious. More than twice the space of the old place and with lots of cool features for cheaper rent. Also, since the move means that I can't take the train to work anymore, we finally bought a car, ending my 5 years of carless-ness.

Anyway, I used to tell everyone, 'hey, you should come visit me in Boston!' but then I would feel terribly disingenuous. I do want all of you guys to come visit me, but there wasn't really room in our old place for guests. And hotel rooms in Boston are outrageously expensive. So I kind of felt like I was telling people that 'hey, why don't you spend $250/night to come see me.' Which seems pretty jerk-y. But, in the new place, there's room for you, your spouse, and maybe even your progeny! So everyone should come visit. Well, maybe not right now, since we're going on vacation this weekend (new travel photos to blog!) and we haven't bought anything for guests to sleep on yet. But soon!

South End, Boston

2011-08-01T14:08:00.000-04:00

After two years, we're moving out of the South End of Boston. We're not going far, just across the river to Cambridge. Even though the South End is expensive and gentrified, full of restaurants equal parts nice and douche-y, it's still a pretty and fun place. Also, it is super conveniently located (south of the river, Back Bay, downtown), and even though Boston is one of the few places in the US with a useful subway system, I hardly took the T and just walked everywhere.

Neighborhood things I'll miss:

SoWa market: A farmers' / food truck / arts & crafts / vintage & antiques market, Sundays in the summer, only a couple blocks from our apartment. We'd get kringle from the Danish Pastry Shop, salted caramel chocolate cupcakes from the Cupcakory, the best iced coffee from the actual bricks & mortar cafe on the site, fresh veggies, decorations for our apartment, and good baby shower presents. And, we'd wander around and point out all the really adorable dogs people have (a lot!).

Don Ricardo's Restaurant: Amid all the fancy-pants restaurants, this is a real neighborhood place. It's Peruvian (plus Brazillan and South American). Everything comes with this burning hot salsa that's so good that you want more even though you're in pain. Other notable items: empanadas (specifically the spinach and cheese ones which sound like they'll taste like Hot Pockets but are actually really great), paella that comes with a lobster tail & claw (for less than $20), and, the dish I couldn't stop ordering, whole fried pampano fish with plantains, salad, and a whole other plate with rice and beans ($15).

J.J. Foley's Cafe: An Irish bar and restaurant, this was our neighborhood bar. We went at least once a week. And the food is significantly better than average bar food.

The dog park: In a neighborhood with a lot of young people with money to burn, we saw a ton of adorable puppies all the time. Even better, the dog park is just one block from our old apartment.

Things I'll have to come back for:

Toro: I wrote about Toro the first time I visited. In short: it's fantastic. Prices have risen significantly, so it's not the steal it used to be. Now it costs about what you'd expect it would and more than you'd want to pay everyday, but it's still great.

Aquitaine: Sean wouldn't let us go to Aquitaine; he was sure it was 100% douche-y. But his parents came for a visit and I argued that we could live with douche-y on someone else's dime. There's no question that it's an expensive place, but it was excellent in every aspect. The interior and ambiance was classic and classy, not douche-y. The service was possibly the best service in a restaurant ever. And the food. The food. (It's French, by the way.) Everything was at minimum 'really good': the arctic char entree and the bread pudding were incredibly and unbelievable good, respectively.

Not Courmayeur, Mostly Valle d'Aosta

2011-07-11T21:10:00.006-04:00

And here are all the photos from my Italy trip that were not of Courmayeur itself.

I went for a 'walk' (which turned out to be hiking -- I hate hiking). But it was pretty (pics above and below).

On one afternoon off (there was more than one afternoon off: it was that kind of conference), we went into Aosta itself. Here is the town hall, but there were a lot of nice Roman ruins too.

Arco d'Augusto:

Porta Praetoria and the Torre dei Signori Sancti Ursi:

And a Roman theater:

For the conference dinner, we went to some 'agriturismo' place with a field full of cows with very very loud bells attached to them.

And somewhere behind those clouds and thereabouts is Mont Blanc.

Finally, back in Milan, I stayed one night in a hotel before catching my flight back to the US. It had a garden and pool area crawling with these (kinda cute) little lizards, which did not want me to photograph them.

Italy II: the revenge (Courmayeur)

2011-07-02T12:55:00.018-04:00

I went on a week long trip to Italy for a repeat of the 2009 Italy conference I went to: lots of the same people, same organizers, same week in June, same region of Italy. While still in Valle d'Aosta, this time the little town was Courmayeur not Cogne. And this time I was going to be prepared.

Imagine June 2009: winding mountain roads, wildflowers everywhere, cheese at every meal (even cheese soup). Me: lactose intolerant, allergies and no antihistamines, antiemetic chewing gum that made my whole mouth numb and freaked me out.

This time I brought piles of Lactaid and Claritin and Dramamine. How did it go? Well, for some reason (maybe they had an early spring), there were no wildflowers. The Dramimine seemed to work okay. But even though I took Lactaid like vitamins, everything I ate made me sick. The first few days were the worse; I felt terrible and I was starving because I couldn't eat anything. Still, I guess two out of three isn't bad.

Here's a photo of my hilariously tiny bed:

And a bunch of photos looking out of my hotel room in different weather conditions:

How Weird Is This?

2011-06-29T10:31:00.003-04:00

I'm working on a post or two about my trip to Italy, but I thought I'd post about this since it happened today. This morning, when I went to put my laptop in my backpack, I noticed that one of the rubber feet had fallen off. I wasn't surprised since it had been loose for a while:

The odd thing is that it turns out that the rubber foot is structural. Without it, you can see straight into the inside of my computer. I tried to take a pic:

How weird is that?

By the way, I found the missing rubber foot on the floor of my office and currently it's held in place with tape. Should I try to glue it back on? With what?

At the AAS

2011-05-24T16:19:00.001-04:00

I'm attending the AAS meeting in Boston right now (yes, right now). I brought a poster to justify my presence here and a lot of people bring flyer size copies of their poster to give out. The work in my poster is already published, so that seemed a little silly for me (people should just read the paper). At the printer, however, they made a proof of my poster and I figured I might as well bring that and see if anyone took it. I really didn't believe anyone would though. It's not regular paper -- it's like a square foot big (maybe bigger) and much much thicker than regular paper. But it's already disappeared from my table! It was gone before lunch. So someone here is carrying an oversized, cardboard-y version of my poster.

Sent from my iPhone

NYTimes Paywall Update

2011-04-27T14:07:00.001-04:00

Yeah, as it turns out, I didn't really need to read nytimes.com.

Random Germany Thought #3-- Strawberries and Doing the Dishes

2011-04-27T13:49:00.004-04:00

I've been eating grocery store strawberries lately. On the whole, they're crap: giant monstrosities that taste like crunchy water. In Bonn, you only buy strawberries for a few weeks, when they're in season. They're always very local -- small, but super sweet and full of strawberry flavor -- and you have to eat them right away. Many farmers set up road-side stands (there was a very good one across the street from work, in front of the bakery) where you can buy them in giant boxes. Mmmm.

Is this a German / European thing? When I do the dishes, I wash, then rinse, then dry (if for some reason I didn't have a place to air-dry them). When I would do a dinner thing with the students in Germany, they would wash, then towel dry. No rinsing. I got used to it although I think it kind of freaked out the Canadian postdoc.

NYTimes Paywall

2011-03-17T11:48:00.002-04:00

The NYTimes paywall goes up in the US on March 28. What are your plans?

Pufferfish Cake

2011-02-20T17:00:00.003-05:00

For Sean's birthday, I bought this cake in Chinatown.

Isn't it awesome? I didn't even bother to ask what it tastes like. Even the box it came in is cool.

We thought it'd be really funny if it turned out to be durian flavored, but it turned out to be something angel food cake-like.

There was fruit inside (pineapple, grape, apple, and unidentified others), and the layer that looks like fruit in the photo turned out to mango flavored custard (or maybe more like jello). Yummy.

My Gym Is Closing!

2011-02-16T10:21:00.006-05:00

This post is 100% pure whine. My gym is closing at the end of the month -- just two weeks notice! And I'm very sad about the whole thing. What will I do when it's gone?! Reasons why my gym is awesome:

1.) Conveniently located between our apartment and the train station.

2.) Reasonably priced (including towel service and all the group classes).

3.) Sean and I get to be gym buddies every day.

4.) Nice facilities, always clean locker room, never really crowded, no sign-ups for cardio machines, no waiting for a shower. [These features are probably not unrelated to the reasons for their closing.]

5.) People working there are friendly (some even knew my name) and a relaxed (non-douche-y) atmosphere.

6.) Little things: the big bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower stalls (and, yes, I used them -- I'm too lazy to tote my own product); hair dryers and lotion too; the translucent glass shower stall doors (curtains inevitably lead to someone ripping the curtain opening while you're inside showering); and probably a lot of things that I'm forgetting but will remember and shake my fist about when I'm working out somewhere else.

And now it I will probably have to migrate to the further away women-only gym and Sean will have to go back to the university gym. Sigh.

My Morning

2011-01-17T10:15:00.003-05:00

I'm at work today -- at least for a few hours. Since it's MLK day, school is closed and I have to swipe my ID card to get in the building, to call for the elevator, and to hit the button for my floor. I'm usually only here during business hours, so this is rare behavior for me and it took more of my concentration than you might expect.

So I get into the elevator in the lobby (I notice that there's only a couple of people around), try to hit '3' for my floor, remember I need to swipe my ID again, swipe again, and then finally get '3' to light up. The door closes and the elevator starts moving. Then I turn around. And there's a little black toy poodle standing next to me in the elevator. There's no one else in the elevator. It looks at me inquisitively. Oh crap.

I Made It to Work Today

2011-01-13T13:06:00.004-05:00

It snowed a bunch yesterday and I never made it out of my apartment at all. But today, I thought I'd try to make the slog to work. Fortunately, I ordered a pair of waterproof boots the very morning after the last snow storm. They seem to work pretty good.

Lambic Beer

2010-12-28T15:40:00.001-05:00

I went to Brussels a few years back (and blogged about it) and had lambic beer for the first time. It is traditionally brewed in only a few places in Belgium by spontaneous fermentation (from the medley of wild yeast in the environment of the brewery and not from carefully controlled yeast strains), taking several years to make, and has a distinctive sour taste (maybe more winey than beery). Often flavored by fruit, the authentic stuff adds real, whole fruit with a secondary fermentation. The imitators add sweeteners and syrups. Here's a good article I found on lambic, and here's the wiki page.

Some of the best of the real deal comes from the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. Thankfully, it is acquirable in the U.S. The most commonly found 'lambic' in the U.S. is Lindemans. It's dangerously yummy, but if you've had Cantillon at the brewery in Brussels, you will immediately know that Lindemans' not the real deal. It's sweet, never sour.

Given the complexity of the lambic-making process, blending and aging is as important as the spontaneous fermentation. Hanssens Artisanaal is a blender -- buying lambic from brewer before fermentation takes hold and aging and blending in their own cellars.

Which brings us to the beer in the photo: Hanssens Artisanaal's Experimental Cassis. A friend found it in a local liquor store. Fruity, sour, dry, with little aftertaste -- it's great. Here's the Beer Advocate listing. All of the reviews which rate it below an A are written by idiots with no taste buds.

Best Food Day (in Boston) Ever

2010-12-25T10:28:00.005-05:00

On Friday, we went to Men-Tei, a tiny hole-in-the-wall Japanese noodle and rice bowl shop near Newbury and Hereford. It was our first time, and it was awesome. I had fried pork chop noodles. It was exactly like the noodles you get in Taiwan -- fried pork goodness and chewy noodles for a good price ($9 in Boston, probably $3-4 in Taiwan).

For special occasions, my Mom makes a roasted duck stuffed with sticky rice dish. Since Sean and I are staying in Boston for the holidays this year, we decided that Sean would try to make it. But my Mom outright refused to tell us how -- she decided that deboning a duck, stuffing it, and sewing it up again was beyond our abilities. (She said she's show us how next year.) Anyway, we compromised and made the duck and sticky rice, separately. The sticky rice is made with sweet rice, onions, mushrooms, chestnuts, and a little ground pork. The key ingredient in the sticky rice, however, is duck fat collected from the roasting duck. For dessert, Sean made raspberry pie. It was a glorious meal:

Das Räuchermännchen

2010-12-18T16:42:00.003-05:00

Sean went to Germany a few weeks ago and came back with a räuchermännchen ('little smoking man'). A figurine of a woodsman or craftsman (is this little guy a shepherd?), there is a little plate in the center of it on which a little cone of incense is burned, and the smoke comes out of the mouth.

Christmas Tree

2010-12-15T07:32:00.001-05:00

Germany is on the Honor System Redux

2010-11-28T17:09:00.003-05:00

I wrote a post a long, long time ago on how the German public transportation system operates on the honor system. You buy and validate tickets, but bus drivers are not checking boarding passengers for valid tickets (you can get on in the back of the bus) and there are no turnstiles in the subway. The honor system is probably the reason that you can go to the bus stop in Germany, look at the bus schedule posted, and know at what minute the bus will arrive. There are random checks and fines if you are found without a valid ticket, but I cannot remember ever being checked in the entire time I lived there -- never on the bus for sure, never on the U-Bahn, maybe once on the S-Bahn (actually, that might have been a Deutsche Bahn train). I assumed that the system works because Germans are just more honest than Americans. Anyway, Sean is in Germany right now and he says that today when the ticket checker came into his S-Bahn car, 4 of 8 people did not have a ticket. There goes that theory.

Still Alive ... For Now

2010-11-24T15:17:00.002-05:00

I accidentally ate some moldy pie (apple, if you're curious) this morning -- yes, for breakfast --which puts me one step closer to actually being Homer Simpson.

Also, it gives me an excuse to post this classic clip:

This was the best resolution clip I found. It has the added features of being the German version and, for some reason, mirror-reversed. (German Homer is weird, right? Very pimply-faced kid-like. I tried to explain this when I lived in Germany, but they were just too used to it to hear it.)

Still Alive

2010-10-31T20:55:00.002-04:00

Sorry about all the blog neglect. I've just gotten really, really busy. I promise that I'll be back again with more posts in a couple of weeks.

Taiwan

2010-09-06T16:10:00.000-04:00

Even more delinquent, here are a few pictures from my trip to Taiwan in April.

Above is Longshan Temple in Taipei. It is crazy in there with people and lots of lots of incense smoke. Here's another picture:

1.) Tourist-y things to note about Taiwan. Stay long enough and you will be in an earthquake. Usually they're pretty mild. I was on the 13th floor and it was a significant rocking motion, but if I'd been on the street I probably wouldn't have noticed a thing. The biggest tourist attraction in Taiwan is probably the National Palace Museum with a giant collection of ancient Chinese art. (The "National Palace" in question is the Forbidden City in Beijing. The tourists in question are Mainland Chinese.) We also went to Taipei 101, now the second tallest building in the world. Nowadays, Taipei has a very nice, very convenient subway system. Below are pictures from the Chiang Kai-Shek memorials. It's massive.

2.) Food. You would think that a week in Taiwan (a sub-tropical country) would be bad for my digestive system, the dreaded 'Delhi belly' and all. But I was basically fine, as was Sean. (Oddly enough, Japan was much worse for the both of us.) That was a relief because Taiwan is full of good (and often incredibly cheap) things to eat. Din Tai Fung (twice). Department store food courts are really good -- a giant meal for about $4 USD. Night markets. The Taiwanese love to eat. My grandparents organized a little 13 course banquet for us. And giant shrimp. I can't find the photo now, but we ate some shrimp that were larger than my hand and we saw at the night market these shrimp-like things where the front two legs extended two or three times the length of the shrimp's body. Crazy!

3.) I suppose it's true of anywhere, but Taiwan has really changed from what I remember from trips when I was a kid. The old, dirty, smelly, pushy Taiwan is still there -- in parts. But now there's a new Taiwan: clean (really clean, not just less dirty), orderly, cosmopolitan, yuppie, where the only pushy-ness is from busloads of Chinese tourists. The dog of choice is a toy poodle -- in an elaborate and adorable costume (i.e., you have a cute toy poodle, you must put him in an even cuter bumblebee costume). The parks. The fancy subway. The live MLB baseball shown on multiple channels. The acknowledgement and celebration of aboriginal culture at some tourist spots. The clearest example are the taxis. They still dart through traffic, seconds away from the a crash (one taxi ride involved a full block of driving on the wrong side of the road right in the middle of the city). But they used to be foul, full of cigarette-stick affairs. Now they smell actually good. Really good. Better than any taxi in the U.S. and all the drivers have tiny HD TVs to watch while waiting.

One last thing about old Taiwan. I went to see my Dad's old house. It's in the old part of the city -- a place that was developed early and was probably cutting-edge many decades ago but now seems pretty old in comparison to the other quarters. Across the street is still the same bakery that my Dad loved as a kid. I'd been to the house before, but this time my Dad pointed across the street and to the corner, a few buildings down. That building was (naturally) under construction, but he said very casually, 'that's where the 228 incident happened.' Holy cow. In the annuals of Taiwanese history, 228 is one of the biggest events (read the wikipedia entry about it here). As it turns out, my Dad and his family had gone out that night (to the movies, I think) and missed the actual precipitating incident.

4.) One morning, we tried to fly to Hualien (on the East coast) from Taipei for a day trip, but with poor visibility, the 20 minute flight because 75 minutes of flying in circles before we landed back in Taipei.

Crazy messages on baseball hats worn by actual tourists at the airport: 1.) "World Terrorism. Wow." 2.) "This is my Fuck Cap."

We tried again the next day -- this time via the train. Taroko Gorge is gorgeous, the kind of scenery where -- as Sean whispered to me in the car -- "that's where the pandas are!"

5.) We also went to the Southern end of the island. There are a bunch of little beach towns there (by the way, it doesn't matter where in the world you are, beach towns all look the same). And I guess it was onion season because we drove past miles and miles of onion stands.

Old Ching-era city all:

Alpaca

2010-08-28T19:45:00.001-04:00

I went to Fairyland in Oakland, CA today with (to entertain my niece) and met this fella who goes by -- I'm not kidding -- Señor Juan Valdez. He seemed to really like me, coming up to say hello a lot and 'humming' (really more of a whine).

Tokyo Redux

2010-08-21T17:04:00.022-04:00

Oh so very very late, here are a few pictures from my trip to Tokyo in May. I heavily blogged my last trip to Tokyo, but this time around not so much. So here are some highlights.

1.) We stayed at one hotel with hilarious 1960s-vision-of-the-future decor. Everything in white. Everything in our room in molded white plastic. Awesome view, though. I tried to get some pictures:

2.) Watching tv in Japan is great. Every commercial has an adorable animated mascot. And I correctly guessed that the tv show were were watching was a boy band talk show.

3.) Food. You know what's surprisingly good together? Foie gras and daikon. I know, sounds terrible. But it was really really good. We went to a tiny, classy, old-school bar where the bartender chipped ice from big blocks by hand. And, most importantly, the ninja restaurant!

4.) Last time, I went to the Roppongi Hills (indoor) observation deck. This time, they had opened up the helipad for tourists. It's not like any other outdoor observation deck. No rails or fencing. Just standing out in this big open space way up on the roof (floor 54) and you can see city as far as you can see.

5.) Finally, we went to the Studio Ghibli museum. It's a bit out of the city. But so very worth it. It's not a regular museum: there are no maps, no little plaques explaining the historical context of the exhibits. It's really looks exactly as you imagine it would look in a Miyazaki movie or possibly what the inside of Miyazaki's mind looks like. There's a mock-up of an animation studio. There's a room with a giant Catbus for (and, sadly, only for) little kids to play on and in. And their theater shows shorts that are only shown there. And there's no video screens. Just drawings and models and film being projected. Here is someone else's photos and description of the museum and my favorite (and this blogger's too) part of the museum is described: the zoetrope. You're not allowed to take photos inside, but here are some from the outside.

Totoro's in the ticket office!

On the roof of the building there's a giant statue of one of the robots from Castle in the Sky. You can go have have your picture taken with it.

Books I Still Haven't Finished

2010-08-17T16:36:00.005-04:00

If you have been monitoring my goodreads.com profile, you will have noticed that there are a couple of books that have been on the 'currently reading' list for more than a year: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and Halldor Laxness's Independent People. I haven't ruled out finishing them, but I'm not actively trying to read them now. I also started the novel version of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall more than a month ago and haven't finished it. Why haven't I finished reading these books?

I can pinpoint the answer for Quicksilver:

The year is 1713, and Enoch Root goes to visit Dr. Daniel Waterhouse and the institute he has founded: the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts. It's only page 16 of 916 and it's unbearably cute. I didn't make it past page 50.

Independent People came highly recommended. It just seems to require more attention than I can give to it. Basically all my reading gets done on airplanes and it's just not airplane reading material.

As for Nightfall, it is hilariously direct in the analogy between fictional astronomical conundrums and real-life counterparts. But it's only been a month and a half, so I might still pull through.

Anyone want to make a case for taking another crack at any/all of these books?

Egg Timer

2010-08-09T16:45:00.009-04:00

I'm sorry for all the blog neglect. I've been busy, but it's not like I have a really good excuse like Tim. I still have a backlog of really old stuff to blog, but to get going I'm presenting to you right now the most awesome kitchen gadget ever:

Sean and I found it at Crate & Barrel while trying to use up the last of our wedding gift cards. It's an egg timer for boiling eggs, telling when they'll be soft, medium, or hard. And I hate hard boiling eggs: I'm always anxious. Am I cooking them long enough? Am I leaving them in too long?

How does it work? Put it in the pot of boiling water with the eggs.

Watch.

The eggs are now medium (I only pulled the timer out for a better photo.)

And now, they're hard.

Awesome!

Random World Cup Thoughts

2010-07-02T10:17:00.006-04:00

Anyone following the World Cup? I've been watching even though I can't ever remember the name of the one U.S. player I've heard of. Landon Donovan is such an odd name, so I get as far as "Lan" and then all I can think of is "-do Calrissian?"

I was fairly invested in the Germany-England match. Despite the WWII reference nonsense, I was rooting for Germany (it's the only team where I actually know the players' names). I was so tense when England had the non-goal goal (thinking that the tide was turning) that I couldn't watch until it was 3-1. I'm okay with Germany losing to Argentina or Spain if they get that far. But England seems to be all whining and self-absorption (this opinion is, of course, totally uninformed by anything) -- like the Yankees, but suckier at their given sport.

Aside from my Germany leanings, the most awesome final -- in a very Simpsons-tastic way -- would naturally be Paraguay v. Uruguay. Unfortunately the countries aren't right, but I couldn't resist including this clip:

New Office

2010-06-15T13:20:00.004-04:00

After dawdling for a few weeks, I finally moved into my new office today. It's got windows and I'm now actually kinda weirded out by typing in natural light. I'd been holding out until new(er) furniture arrived in the office and then until I felt like I had more free time. I moved my books yesterday, but the final straw for moving my computer and actual work stuff came this morning when a professor showed up and said he'd be stashing a few summer students in my old office for a while.
Old office:

New office:

Gay Pride Parade 2010

2010-06-14T10:47:00.014-04:00

A couple of decades ago, the neighborhood where I live -- the South End -- was considered a gay neighborhood. With gentrification, that identity has faded and now it's more like a 'gay lawyers who live in multi-million dollar houses' neighborhood. The gay pride parade (the 40th!) was held this Saturday, and our apartment faced out onto the very end of the staging area and very beginning of the parade route.

On the whole, it was family friendly and surprisingly neighborhood-y. Unfortunately, the sporadic drizzle turned into steady rain by the midpoint of the parade and the crowd thinned out. But there was a nice crowd in front of my building (not even on the official parade route) at the start.

Our corner was the staging area for all the motorcycle clubs. Unfortunately, I didn't get any really good picture of the bikes.

Of course, the mayor and the governor were there:

One of the biggest groups was actually a protest against Hyatt with signs saying "Anti-Worker, Anti-Gay."

I think the first costume is a lobster, but I'm not sure what the second one is or represents:

There's something about this rainbow colored dumbbell; I think it's the awesome amateur-ness of it. And what is with that Chipotle Grill sponsored balloon? Is it supposed to be something more than an amorphous cylinder?

Eastern Standard

2010-05-31T12:06:00.002-04:00

I went to Eastern Standard Saturday night. It is an American/French food restaurant located not far from Fenway Park. I had an appetizer of bone marrow and an entree of lobster risotto. The bone marrow, though good, was ginormous. Three full chunks of bone (one of which was significantly wider at the bottom) with 4 toast points. By the last one, I was just piling the marrow on, desperately trying to balance it. I think that if I had a regular slice of bread, I could have covered it in marrow 1 inch thick. I had no idea that you could get full on bone marrow. (I only made it maybe 1/2 way through the risotto and had to take the rest home. It tasted much better the next day when I wasn't just trying to gut it out.)

Today in Weather

2010-05-31T12:00:00.006-04:00

It was hot and clear when I went to the gym this morning. When I got out, it was noticeably cooler. It is hazy in all directions. There is the smell of smoke too, but the haze is everywhere -- way too pervasive to be a local fire. Ash from Iceland? Smoke from fire somewhere? Crazy ideas. I convinced myself that it must be offshore fog rolling in, but checking the weather shows I was right the first time: wildfires in Canada. Unbelievable.

Eurovision 2010

2010-05-31T11:48:00.002-04:00

Germany won the Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday with this song, "Satellite" sung by 19-year old Lena. I didn't see it, of course, but it's notable for 2 reasons. One, it runs counter to the trend of domination by Eastern European countries. Although there have been recent wins by Finland and Norway, one might have thought that the old school Eurovision countries -- e.g., France, Germany -- might never win again. The second unusual thing is that the song is a genuine pop hit. Here's the song (not the live performance):

Mangosteen

2010-05-17T14:48:00.003-04:00

I know I ought to be blogging about Taiwan and Japan, but this weekend Sean found mangosteens on sale at the Chinese grocery store. Banned from importation into the U.S. until 2007, I'd read about the tropical fruit online but never seen it or tasted it fresh. (By the way, I have had canned mangosteen which was fairly gross and I can now report tastes nothing like mangosteen at all.) To eat, cut the leathery skin until you can pull off a hemisphere and then use your fingers or a small fork to ease out the white segments. The fruit is very soft (softer than any other fruit I can think of) and there's not a lot to eat (the larger segments have big seeds that you spit out). The descriptions of its flavor that I'd read said citrus. After eating one, it is really hard to describe. Sweet and citrus-y, yes, and it has a vague kiwi flavor but sweet and mild, with no acid-y tang. It was really good and I can see why people love them.

Jetlagged

2010-05-14T08:00:00.003-04:00

I landed in Boston Sunday night and I'm still very jetlagged. Took-the-6:30AM-train-to-work jetlagged. When I first got back, I was sleepy in the afternoons and awake in the mornings. I've now progressed to tired and can sleep in the afternoons and tired and cannot sleep in the mornings. Fantastic. Anyway, I wrote a couple of short book reviews on my goodreads account yesterday and I'll start working on some vacation posts soon.

Ponyo

2010-04-19T10:03:00.004-04:00

I got around to watching "Ponyo," the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki, last night. It's the most awesomely adorable thing ever. And having seen several Miyazaki films, that's saying a lot.

Here's the adorable end credit song (in Japanese).

I'm going to Taiwan and Tokyo for a a couple of weeks, starting this Thursday. I don't know if I'll be able to update from the road. If not, I'll see you guys when I'm back.

Crazy or Faking It?

2010-04-15T20:17:00.007-04:00

So there were 6 of us at journal club today when some guy peeked his head in. It's prefrosh days at Brown and he showed up talking to a professor, so even though he looked to be in his mid-twenties, the assumption was that he was a prospective student. He apologized for interrupting and asked if he could introduce himself and ask a question. We asked him what the question was and he launched into a halting and rambling spiel. He apologized for having difficulties talking because he English wasn't his first language ... because he was an alien ... from the future. I should point out right now that he was a mostly ordinary looking white guy except that he had long blond hair maybe in some sort of braid, a Russian hat (suede looking, not fur), and an animal skull hanging around his neck. At some point, one of the students interrupted him and asked him what his actual question was. What I could pick out of his statement had to do with H.G. Wells and building a time machine and wanting to discuss it with some sort of theoretical astrophysicist, and who could he talk to? Another of the students suggested that he needed engineers not theorists if he wanted to build something, but he was adamant that he wanted to discuss theory. Eventually I told him that he had to decide: he could sit down and join the meeting (and presumably, listen to some student describe a paper) or he could leave. He chose to leave.

We actually finished the rest of the meeting before talking about the little visit. Most of the reactions were 'how crazy was he?' But I'm fairly convinced that the whole thing was an act -- maybe some sort of weird performance art. If I had thought he was truly crazy, I think I would have been nicer to him. But, instead, these 3 things struck me as he was speaking:

1.) His origin story seemed to be cribbed from Scientology. I don't remember exactly what he said other than that he was from googols and googols in the future, but it had a distinct Scientology bent to it.

2.) He said that he didn't speak English very well and spoke haltingly. But he also looked down a lot and seemed to be reading from at least notes and quite possibly a script.

3.) I feel like crackpots usually try to ingratiate themselves with people they think either can help them or need their help. He seemed more interested in making us uncomfortable than ingratiating himself with us.

Now there are all valid crazy person explanations for these three things: crazy people often crib from other sources and are not known for their social skills. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there's some sort of 'musings from a time traveling alien' blog with today's post being 'interacting with Brown University astrophysicists.'

An aside, what about that professor he showed up with? Our visitor must have accosted him in the hall and when the professor saw that he was distracted by us, slipped away. He totally dumped the (possibly faking) crazy guy on us. Not cool, not cool. ;)

I Live in the US, But I Still Cannot Pronounce Anything Properly

2010-04-06T11:46:00.002-04:00

Back in the day, I wrote this post about "English" words that people in Germany used but I didn't recognize. I also noted recently that I never pronounced the name of the city I lived in properly.

Well, I live in the US now, but one of the quirks of living in Boston, or maybe in Massachusetts generally or even in the East Coast generically, is that a lot of places have names that you think you know how to pronounce, but don't. I suppose it's carried over from the UK, so the city of Worcester, MA is pronounced "Wooster" (well more like wuhster). And Haverhill is pronounced HAY-vril, naturally. Even words that you're 100% sure you know how to say are pronounced differently. For example, Peabody, MA isn't pea-body as you might assume, but pea-buddy.

I live on Tremont Street. It took me a couple of weeks before I realized that it is not pronounced TREE-mont. Knowing that there was a different pronunciation, my first thought was that it must be TRAY-mont. But no, still wrong. It took me a couple of months, probably, to get it right, and now it's a little difficult to puzzle out how to write what I say. I'll go with treh-mont or maybe treh-munt, unless someone else has a better idea.

Boston Restaurant Week - Uni Sashimi Bar at Clio Restaurant

2010-03-24T11:30:00.005-04:00

Sunday we went to Uni Sashimi Bar at Clio Restaurant. They're both projects of Ken Oringer -- who's responsible for Toro (our restaurant week winner so far). Clio is a French restaurant, and Uni is the sashimi bar in a little alcove of the restaurant. There were two tables and we sat at the bar (just 6 seats). It's the only place on our list that's not in the South End (it's in Back Bay) and is a fairly high end, upscale place.

First Course:

Poke with sweet onions, sesame, seaweek & pickled mung bean
Fluke sashimi with jalapeno vinagrette, blood orange, and Thai basil

Second Course:

Chirashi

The rice was cooked in plum wine and maybe some soy (it was red and sweet and maybe a little sour) and consisted of two kinds of rice, white and forbidden rice. On top was pickled daikon, pickled burdock root, fermented seaweed, pickled ginger, and one more thing I couldn't identify. Although I was worried about tiny, tiny portions at a place like this, the fish -- yellowtail, salmon, tuna -- was 9 pieces total.

Third Course:

Coconut tapioca with passionfruit, pineapple & guava sorbet
Japanese Yuzu Curd with coffee croquant & whole milk ice cream

Another winner. The fluke sashimi was awesome -- the jalapeno vinagrette was a nice touch. The chirashi was excellent (loved the rice). And while the yuzu curd was great, Sean managed to form some sort of emotional bond with the 5 spoonfuls of coconut tapioca and the 1 spoonful of guava sorbet. He was ready to order a trough full. As you might expect from a place like that, $33 of food wasn't exactly belly busting. You probably need to spend about twice that amount to get really full at a high end sushi place.

Other notes:

Outside of some fast-food sushi, this is the first time I've seen a restaurant with a non-Japanese sushi chef.

Sunday at 6:30pm is a much better time to go to dinner than a weekday at 8pm. No waiting. Excellent service.

They gave us a $20 gift card to use on a non-restaurant week return visit. Pretty cool. I suppose they're trying to drum up business. While the Uni side was fairly full, the Clio side (not participating in restaurant week) was entirely empty. And while both sides are expensive, they seem to offer some pretty cool weekday deals. I think we'll make it back (the Clio menu has some of the yummy-looking items that we saw on the chef's Iron Chef America episode).

[Updated 11:45 AM] And that's it for restaurant week. We had one more reservation for tonight. But a bad review and a bad report from someone we know, and we just canceled. I declare Toro our restaurant week winner.

Boston Restaurant Week - Sibling Rivalry

2010-03-21T22:08:00.012-04:00

Sean and I have actually been to Sibling Rivalry before, and we went on Thursday with friends, so this report will probably be a little shorter, less thorough, than the others. The concept for Sibling Rivalry is that there are two chefs -- brothers -- and each prepares a dish based upon one ingredient. So there's two shellfish dish options, two lamb dish options, etc.

8pm is evidently a tough time for a reservation. We waited 25 minute for a table. And we didn't get out of there until 10:20pm, but it was a far superior experience than at the Butcher Shop: there was a lot more food, we spent a significantly longer amount of time actually eating, the seats were way more comfortable, and the bread came right away. And the basket of bread includes slices of corn bread (I love corn bread).

I had tuna and pork wontons, rack of lamb, and blueberry & apple crisp. The wontons were good, but really the best dumplings are always the ones you make yourself or the ones you get at a real dumpling place like Din Tai Fung. The dessert was fine. The lamb, however, was excellent. I was initially thinking that after all that meat at Toro and the Butcher Shop, I should get fish. That's loser thinking. After I was done with the lamb, I really wanted to pick it up and gnaw on the bones; they were so tender and yummy. And it came with some sort of mashed potato thing that was fluffy and delicious.

Boston Restaurant Week - The Butcher Shop

2010-03-18T10:25:00.007-04:00

Wednesday night was the Butcher Shop. A wine bar / actual butcher shop, it's a tiny place with maybe 20 seats at tables and another 10 seats at the bar. A butcher block table is set up in the back where a few (maybe 10) people can stand and have a drink and a snack while waiting for a table. And against the back wall is a set of glass refrigerated cases where you can see the meat, sausages and sides available to take home. The place is supposedly a favorite of Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen.

Where Toro was down-to-earth and unpretentious, the Butcher Shop is the exact opposite. It's not just that it was d-bag central in there; a surprising number of people seemed to have no idea how to behave in public. (Seriously, random person. Are you really going to sit on the butcher block table that people are eating off of like you're in your kitchen at home? Seriously?) And the prices on the regular menu, while not astronomical -- and, yes, that's totally a scientific assessment ;) -- were fairly silly when you could see right in the refrigerated case how much less you'd pay if you took it home. And, then, 1.) you wouldn't be standing around for 20 minutes waiting for a table even though you have a reservation, and 2.) you wouldn't have to hang out with the kind of people who go to the Butcher Shop. For example, the duck hot dog was $16 on the menu (and it's just the hot dog with a bun and a few chips), but I could have bought the hot dog itself for $3. In terms of value, portions were not particular big either. A 20-something dollar entree of meat is just that -- sides are extra. Of course, really none of this (the people, the wait, the money, the portions) was unexpected to me. But what about the food?

This was their restaurant week menu:

Duck Consomme or
Endive Salad

Pork Shoulder or
Skirt Steak

Chocolate Mousse or
Lemon Curd

Since it was the two of use, we got everything on the special menu. The soup, the salad, and the desserts were all fine. The pork shoulder was quite good. The only really excellent thing was the skirt steak. Perfectly medium-rare. The jus was perfect, the crust was perfect (crusty but not at all burnt, so yummy), and finally the delicious center was perfect (juicy, tender, buttery). I didn't know skirt steak could taste like that.

So, not spectacular but quite good. Would I go back? I'm definitely never eating there again (although I'm still a little intrigued by the duck hot dogs). It was not worth the regular prices. Value is, of course, subjective. So what if I were X times richer than I am? Still no because there's still something I haven't commented on: the waiting and the service.

We had reservations at 8pm. When we arrived, the host says that they're not quite ready and puts us at the butcher's block to wait and for drinks. Later, he says that some guests are taking longer than expected and offers us seats at the bar -- which we take. We sit at around 8:20pm. Our appetizers arrive at 8:45pm. It took 45 minutes to get any food -- even bread. The bread, by the way, comes with some fancy honey that Sean quite liked. Our entrees arrive somewhere around 9:20pm. The dessert arrived at 9:45pm. We managed to get out of there at 10pm.

Now, one might think of a lot of reasons for such slow service: 1.) giant influx of people, 2.) not enough waitstaff, 3.) mean or lazy waitstaff. But none of these are what actually happened. As far as I can tell, the Butcher Shop is just completely inefficiently run -- disorganized and possibly incompetent. As I listed before, there's about 30 seats in the whole place (not 30 tables, 30 seats). To serve those 30 people, there was a bartender, 2 waiters, 1 host, and one other person whose exact job was unclear but also added up checks, took drink orders, etc. There was 1 service person for every 6 people in the restaurant. If you include the people who were waiting and got drinks or snacks, there's still 1 service person for every 8 people. You'd think that place that size should be able to get by with half the number of workers. And it wasn't that the people working were sitting around doing nothing -- they were constantly doing stuff and talking about how they can clear a table for new people. But somehow, in some way I cannot fathom, they were incapable of handling everything. Seats went open for 10 minutes or more because no one could get around to cleaning it up or seating new customers. People with reservations had to wait for a seat because 'guests were taking longer than expected' probably because those guests had to wait to be served. And, you might think that maybe the kitchen was the hold up, but most of the menu requires little more than pouring wine and slicing pate, so that's seems fairly improbable too. You would expect a lot of things at a place like the Butcher Shop: the people, the prices, the portions, and hopefully really good meat. But this ineffectualness in the service, the overall dining experience was shocking and completely baffling.

Boston Restaurant Week - Toro

2010-03-16T14:01:00.000-04:00

Sunday was the beginning of Restaurant Week in Boston. Actually two weeks, participating restaurants offer prix fixe menus ($33.10 per person for dinners). We live in near a bunch of restaurants which we've never gone to for fear that they would be a big waste of money, so we made five reservations. Sunday night was Toro, a Spanish tapas place. (Toro has a famous chef owner, Ken Oringer. And, coincidentally, we saw his episode of Iron Chef America the day before.)

The restaurant is actually fairly small -- 55 seats -- and was not d-bag-y (as I feared). It's actually more lively and homey. And the service was great. More importantly, on to the food we ate:

Pinchos:

Corazon a la Plancha - grass-fed beef heart with romesco
Cabeza - pig-head terrine with carrots

Okay, let me just go ahead and spoil the ending for you: it was fantastic. Everything. Every little bit. And when we went home and looked at the regular menu prices, it was all fairly reasonable. We're going back (you would be extremely lucky to come with us). Anyway, the cabeza was basically a pate made from pig's head with little tiny shavings of extremely sweet carrots. The beef heart came sliced thin and piled on top of toast smeared with romesco sauce. It was like the best roast beef you ever had, the extremely smooth texture probably the only sign that it was heart.

Tapas:

Boquerones - white anchoives in vinegar and olive oil

I haven't really liked anchoives in the past; they're very oily and fishy. But even though nothing in this dish disguised those basic properties, they were somehow really great anyway. Also, that was some yummy olive oil.

Pulpos - octopus

So soft but not mushy.

Maiz Asado con Alioli y Queso Cotija. La Especialidad de la Casa - grilled corn with alioli, lime, espelette pepper and aged cheese

These just had chunks of butter coating it. You'd think that'd be gross and too rich. I was undeterred.

Asado de Huesos - roasted bone marrow with radish citrus salad and oxtail marmalade

Oh my. As Sean (his first time eating marrow) said: meat butter. Salty, flavorful and flavored, fat. It's awesome. I expect that someday soon, we'll pop in for a drink and this. The oxtail marmalade was really oxtail on toast -- I'm not sure where the 'marmalade' comes in.

Vientre de Cerdo - crispy pork belly, Burgundy snails, fava beans and smoked maple crumble

The very last thing I ate. It was great, but I wasn't that into the fava beans and maple crumble.

Dessert:

Churros con Chocolate - airy crisp fried pastry with chili infused chocolate

Best churros we'd ever had.

Okay, probably not a lot there for any vegetarians to work with. Sorry. To summarize, by far, the best tapas I've ever had. A few more random thoughts: Now I admit that I have a high tolerance for fatty/oily foods. I've eaten lardo. Usually after tapas, you feel greasy. Even though there was oil and fat and butter in everything, I didn't feel that way at all. And though I was worried there'd be tiny portions, we were both satisfactorily full after the meal.

Rain

2010-03-15T08:41:00.001-04:00

Waiting at the train station this morning. My train is delayed
naturally. There's a couple inches of water on tracks. How very
Miyazaki.

That Was Random

2010-03-07T14:05:00.007-05:00

Warning: this post has some bad language.

I got a text message very early this morning. It's from a phone number I don't recognize, and the reverse phone lookup just says that it's a cell in Hammond, IN (although, I guess the cell itself could be anywhere). Actually, this person texted me before -- twice on New Year's Day with 'happy new year.' Today's message:

"im drunk ! how r u - my nipples are hard as fuck!"

I assume they think I'm someone else.

A few other mysteries (aside from, who is this person?): Is this a booty-text? Did I just accidentally cock-block someone by having a similar phone number? What does that last bit of the text mean? Is that supposed to be a sexual come-on?

I Live in Boston, But I Don't Take the T

2010-03-02T15:36:00.010-05:00

One of the nice things about Boston is the subway system, the "T." It means that Boston is one of the few places in the U.S. where one can get along without a car. In fact, Sean and I do not have a car. But since we moved to the South End, I've been on the T less than once a month. Partly this is because we live near the commuter rail station and I take commuter rail to get to work. The other thing is that we live in the most convenient location in Boston. I live in the neighborhood with the fancy restaurants. A 15 minute walk north puts me in the neighborhood with the fancy shopping. A few blocks up my street is Chinatown (with the giant Chinese grocery store). Keep on going and I'll pass downtown and hit the river (not a bad run on a nice day). I guess that helps make up for the 3 hour per day commute.

Boston Is Not a Hot Dog Kind of Town

2010-02-12T13:18:00.007-05:00

When I lived in Germany, I never once ate or even thought about eating hot dogs -- even though I actually knew a place where I could get them. It just didn't seem right when I ate sausages (mm, bockwurst, so yummy, so hard to order correctly*) all the time. In the few months I've been back in the U.S., I've found that I've been thinking more and more about the meals I had at Sammy's when I was finishing up my thesis: hot dog, fries, milkshake (~$7). But, apparently, Boston is not a hot dog kind of town. Not a milkshake kind of town either. Admittedly I don't live in a greasy spoon kind of neighborhood, but there's a (at least) pizza joint on every corner (often burgers, but no milkshakes, no hot dogs). So I don't know where to get a hot dog -- let alone a Chicago dog. I don't even know where to find a good diner. Thinking about hot dogs and Sammy's makes me think about going to Salonica's and having breakfast. I miss that too.

* Bockwurst digression: Words like 'bockwurst' and 'Bonn' are not easy for an American to say correctly in German. Yes, that's right, I lived there for three years and never pronounced the name of the city I lived in correctly. When I tried to say 'Bonn' (more correctly, it should come out more like 'bun' than 'bon'), the person I was speaking to would say 'Bern? In Switzerland?' Ordering bockwurst was nearly impossible. For all but a handful of times, I was served a bratwurst. And I'd sigh. And then I'd eat the bratwurst because -- hello! -- it's bratwurst.

Train Hijinks

2010-01-29T08:42:00.009-05:00

In college, I lived on campus. In grad school, I lived 6 blocks from my office. In Germany, I lived a 10 minute bike ride from work. Today, I live in Boston, MA and work in Providence, RI. I take an hour train ride each way and spend 3 hours per day commuting. The good news is that I do the reverse commute and the trains are never more than 1/2 full. The bad news is that they run fairly infrequently. And here something to ponder: The train starts at South Station. In Boston. It's the end of the line. I get on at Back Bay. It's the next stop, still in Boston, and not that hard to get to on the subway. Yet, the train arrives full at Back Bay, and most everyone on the train gets off. Can someone explain this to me?

Anyway, usually, the train is pretty reliable. Going home, I walk in the door at 7:08PM. But the past two weeks have been full of odd timings. Last Monday, there was an Amtrak train disabled on the tracks, and I got home one hour late. And the train has been noticebly late (more than 10 minutes) twice more since then. And suddenly, I've been synchronized with the neighbor across the hall. Leaving for work, I walk out the door at 8:18AM. In the past two weeks, I've opened the door to see my neighbor opening his door three times. The doors are exactly aligned, maybe 6 feet apart. It's pretty weird, especially since we're going to the same place (the train station), but aren't really inclined to talk to each other.

Speaking of being synchronized: Back during the many years that Sean and I were dating, we'd occasionally goes clothes shopping together. And Sean would say, 'Should I get this sweater in color X or color Y?' And I would say, 'I like color X.' And everything would be hunky-dory. But I should have been more forward-thinking. Now we live together and our schedules are such that a lot of the time Sean is heading out the door as I'm jumping in the shower. And every few weeks, I get home and I look at him and I look down at me, and he looks at me and looks down at himself, and, yes, we're matching. Not quite as embarrassing and getting to work and discovering that you're matching with your thesis advisor (yes, I've done that too) and now you need to go hide in your office all day. But pretty mortifying nonetheless.

Future blog posts: I'm thinking I should write a few about Boston. Are people interested in Boston?

Post-Election Day

2010-01-20T11:37:00.001-05:00

Sigh.

The Executive Suite

2010-01-07T13:08:00.004-05:00

I am at the AAS meeting in DC right now but I'm leaving for Boston in a few hours. Sean and I just checked out of our hotel room. Since we had arrived Monday (and not Sunday), the hotel ran out of rooms, and they gave us an Executive Suite. It had the square footage of our apartment.

There were two couches, an armchair, and a dining room table in the living room. And the bedroom was just slightly smaller than a regular hotel room.

It had a double door at the entrance.And a little balcony from which you could see the Washington Monument.

Random Germany Thought #2

2009-12-19T14:07:00.003-05:00

Back the in the day, when I lived in Germany, I had the same stunning realization every time I visited the U.S. after several consecutive months of hearing nothing but various forms of European accented English: Americans talk funny. They have a twang, a cadenced whine. Not just Southerners or Texans. People I at one point would have said spoke normal, unaccented English sound like this. I probably sound like this. I'm sorry to report, it's not a pretty sound. Of course, about two minutes after I moved back to the U.S., I totally forgot about it.

Random Germany Thought

2009-12-16T11:12:00.003-05:00

I took this picture at an outlet mall in New Hampshire and then forgot about it. But this vest (is it a fishing vest? what is it?) illustrates one of those little quirky differences between living in Bonn and living in Boston. This is the de rigeur fashion accessory for German retirees. Every white-haired man in Bonn sports one. I can't explain it. My neighborhood in Boston doesn't even have any retirees. Just yuppies.

DC in January?

2009-12-16T10:03:00.002-05:00

Both Sean and my boss are out of town, so I'm commuting 90 minutes each way between an empty apartment and an empty office. Ridiculous. I'd work from home, but right now I don't trust myself to not sit on the couch all day.

Anyway, I'm thinking about going to DC during the AAS meeting, January 3-7. I'd stay Monday through Thursday. Anyone else going to be around then? I haven't committed to actually attending the meeting if I go (or going at all), so I might have a lot of time to hang out with people.

The Mountain Goats @ The Wilbur Theatre

2009-11-30T10:59:00.020-05:00

Sean and I went to see the Mountain Goats last night at the Wilbur Theatre.

The Wilbur Theatre is a 10 minute walk from our apartment. It seats about 1200 with a general admission main floor and seating in the mezzanine and balcony. It's a nice place for a show. We sat the first row mezzanine, which are excellent seats. Living so close to the place also meant that I walked to the box office to buy tickets (I cannot stand all those online "convenience" charges).

Opening the show was Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy is essentially a solo project of Owen Pallett (although occasionally including a drummer). From skimming his wikipedia page, you'll find out that he's done the strings arrangement for such groups as Beruit and the Arcade Fire. Also, his second album has the awesome title, He Poos Clouds. I'm not sure how to describe the songs: intense baroque/geek pop? In live performances, what he does is play a few lines on the violin, then loop and sample those lines, and play another melody to the accompaniment of his original lines, then loop and sample those lines -- mixing and matching his samples, his playing, and singing. There's a little bit of stage magic too, controlling all the loops with (I couldn't really see) at least 4 foot pedals so you couldn't really tell at what point you're listening to him playing live and when you're listening to the sample. Pretty neat.

At this point, any reading the blog must know of my deep and abiding love for the Mountain Goats (that last link's to Tim's blog post which got me started back in the day). There's not a lot more I can say about that. But this was the first time I've seen them live, and so far I've got a few complaints about seeing them live:

Short shows. They played maybe for little over an hour. Sean saw them last year and it was the same. There was the opening act, and I don't feel like I got ripped off or anything, but it seems short to me.

The balance was off and the bass (both the instrument and the audio from the guy playing it) was too high.

The final thing is maybe a little uncharitable. At times, they sounded really good. And the middle section with just John Darnielle and his guitar was great. But with the full band and especially when playing their most popular songs, they really kick it up and play it loud. But the band isn't what makes the Mountain Goats the Mountain Goats. And the arrangements make them sound like a generic rock band (maybe a cover band comprised of suburban dads). On the other hand, I can understand that playing their most popular songs must be really boring for them.

Random point #1. The Mountain Goats are hilariously dorky-looking (and I've seen They Might Be Giants). I'd say they look like the band formed as a collaboration between the IT and accounting departments of a small medical supply company. When Sean went to their show last time, he took some friends who weren't very familiar with the band. One, they didn't recognize them when they came out to set up their equipment. Two, when they came back out to play and Sean's friend realizes that this is the band, he says "Is that Dwight Schrute?"

Random point #2. Even though I'd heard recordings of John Darnielle speaking before, it's rather startlingly in person to hear how different his singing voice is from his speaking voice. He sings in a distinctive, nasal staccato. Speaking, he's pitched much deeper and drawls (drawls!).

Here's the setlist as stolen from the Mountain Goats website forums.

1 Samuel 15:23
Old College Try
Cotton
Psalms 40:2
Isaiah 45:23
Deuteronomy 2:10
Enoch 18:14
Genesis 30:3
From TG&Y (solo)
Blueberry Frost (solo)
Mole (solo)
Dance Music (solo)
(Owen comes out)
Going to Bristol
(everyone else comes back)
Hebrews 11:14
Quito
(Owen leaves)
Song for Dennis Brown (& hilarious Dennis Brown anecdote)
Genesis 3:23
This Year
Ezekiel 7 And The Permanent Efficacy Of Grace
Romans 10:9
No Children (w/ Owen on piano)

Mostly songs from the newest album. Enoch 18:14 is a bonus track. 3 songs from The Sunset Tree, 3 from We Shall All Be Healed, 2 from Tallahassee, 1 each from two other albums, 1 unreleased.

A studio version of the unreleased song "From TG&Y" is on the internet and linked above. Enjoy. I'd say that the live version was better.

Turns out John Darnielle appeared on The Colbert Report last month. I missed it but here it is.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-30T08:01:00.003-05:00

Sean did all the cooking including homemade bread and apple butter,
turkey legs, Brussels sprouts, two kinds of mashes potatoes, pumpkin pie, and fresh-made whipped cream.

Best Books of the Decade

2009-11-27T12:07:00.003-05:00

The AV Club has been running a series of "Best of the 00's" listicles. Given how slow my rate of book reading has been since I became an adult, I was rather pleased to see that I'd read 5 of the 20 books on the fiction list for "The best books of the ’00s." And since even better than a listicle is a ranked listicle, I thought I'd better order that subset of books:

1.) Never Let Me Go

I try to review the books I read at goodreads.com. Each book can be rated on a five star scale. None of the I've rated so far have reached 5 stars. Never Let Me Go is the fabled 5 star worthy book. It's incredibly difficult to talk about this book without giving away the plot; I'm not going to even try. It's very short. It's easy to read. But it's impossible to put away. I think that the works of art I appreciate the most are those that strive to be the simplest. It's why Spirited Away is my favorite Miyazaki film.

I read this book in one sitting from 8pm to 4 am or so. Then I crawled into bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about it.

2.) Middlesex & 3.) The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay

I really love The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, but Middlesex may be a little better. Kavalier & Clay is a fantastic story set about the "Golden Age" of comic books -- before, during, and after World War II. It's the kind of book you wish you were talented enough to write, the kind of book the grown-up version of any book-obsessed kid would have to love. I was in the Canary Islands when I read it (the Canary Islands!), and I'd steal some time after lunch to go back to my hotel room to finish reading it. With its pulp influences, it's a great story.

Middlesex is a great story too: like Kavalier & Clay it's about family, adventure, and the making of Americans with a historical setting. But it's one that that seems so real and yet so unique that I could never have conceived of it as a kid. I had to read the book first.

4.) Gilead

I read this book while severely jet-lagged and I remember thinking it was very good, but I'm not sure I found it particularly original or unmissable.

5.) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Of the 2000s Harry Potter books, I'm not sure I'd pick this one as the best. Way better than The Order of the Phoenix, probably a little better than The Deathly Hallows. But I seem to have very fond memories of The Goblet of Fire. What do you guys think?

By the way, most of these I reviewed on goodreads and Eugene wrote a whole bunch on Never Let Me Go at his blog.

This Morning

2009-11-12T10:00:00.003-05:00

I saw this when I came in this morning. I share the office with a
grad student though. I guess grad students don't merit name plates.

New Hampshire

2009-10-26T17:27:00.003-04:00

Taken Sunday from my iPhone.

Still Alive

2009-09-30T08:47:00.002-04:00

Just a note to say that I'm still here and the blog is still alive (I had to get this one in, so September wasn't totally blogless). Lots of planned posts, but as it turns out it's much more difficult to blog when I don't have work to avoid doing. ;) But I'll be back and running soon, I promise.

Goodbye Germany

2009-08-28T12:00:00.002-04:00

So if you've missed all the references in the last few posts, I'm leaving Germany. I'm going to Boston, where I'll be living for at least a few years. I began this blog to document my adventures 'abroad', so there will be a few posts in September wrapping up my time here (pros & cons of Germany, travel summary, ... other ideas?). And what will happen to the blog once I'm ensonced in the USA? I'm not sure yet. For now, I'm going to keep going and see what's there to blog about life in the States. But I may end up pulling the plug. Don't worry, though, I won't just leave you hanging; if it looks like there's not enough to sustain the blog, I'll do a 'goodbye blog' post.

Back in the Office

2009-08-25T07:11:00.004-04:00

After 3 weeks and 1 day, I've finally gotten back into my office -- 4 days before I leave the country for good. But, finally, new windows:

Unfortunately (after 3 weeks and 1 days), there aren't any blinds yet. And my office gets sunlight all day long. So, it'll probably be hot (not so bad today) and impossible to see my computer screen. You can compare them to the old windows here (notice the lack of a dirt line in the new windows -- I tried to illustrate the old dirt line here). Looking out and through the new windows!

I Did It!

2009-08-16T06:00:00.014-04:00

I live in Poppelsdorf, a neighborhood in the city of Bonn. Just south of Poppelsdorf is Venusberg, and, then, south of that is the Kottenforst, a forest. It's not too far from Poppelsdorf, maybe a little more than 3 miles. To get to the Kottenforst, there are three options: go through the woods to the east of Venusberg, go through Venusberg, and go through the woods to the west of Venusberg.

View Kottenforst Bonn in a larger map

Going to the west of Venusberg is my usual route: run up the steep hill to the hospital, down the street with some pretty nice looking houses, through the wooded area to pastures with cows and horses, past the old brick bridge over a ravine with a very small stream, through the path that goes the back way to people's gardens, past the swimming pool, and home. You can run along the stream too -- very cute, winding along and over the stream. The furthest I've gotten is the green marker on the map.

On the other side, I usually get as far as the blue marker, running up the hill to the hospital, then winding back and forth and up and down through a forest path. This past weekend, I finally had the bright idea to go all the way to the top -- to Venusberg itself. There are running/walking/biking paths all over Bonn, along streets, through wooded areas, behind people's houses. That's the cool part. The bad part is that there are not really marked and you have to be careful that you don't get lost. I ran the path that went around Venusberg -- stopped to take in the view of the Siebengebirge and the Bad Godesberg castle. Then turned left to run through the forest. I hadn't decided how far to go, but I could see ahead that the forest was thinning -- blue sky ahead -- and then I was at Annaberger Hof.

Munich Again

2009-08-12T13:00:00.002-04:00

After Salzburg, I spent a couple days hanging around Munich. Unlike my first visit, it was sightseeing-light, beer-drinking heavy: two beer halls, two beer gardens. The best Bavarian beer, in my opinion, is Schneider and you can get it at the Weisses Bräuhaus, where we had weißwurst. Weißwurst is supposed to be a morning thing, so we had to be there and drinking by noon. I feel like the Weisses Bräuhaus isn't as touristy as some bräuhaus-es and our (in typical fashion) gruff waitress totally warmed up to us -- even in our American ineptitude. The Hofbräuhaus, on the other hand, is a ginormous tourist trap and the waitress there (in a first for me in Germany) actually grubbed for a tip -- but it's probably still mandatory to visit.

In a typical Bavarian beer garden, they have stands for beer and food but it's acceptable to bring a picnic and only pay for drinks. We went to one out of the city center (near a very expensive looking neighborhood). Here's me and my friend Amy at one of the biergartens (thanks to Amy for the pictures in this post).
We also went to the beer garden by the Chinesischer Turm (Chinese Tower) in the Englischer Garten (English Garden, duh), a large public park in the center of town. It has 7000 seats and is the second largest in Munich. Germans are very committed to the outdoors; it hailed on us (we were partially protected by trees) and the people around kept on sitting and socializing.

There's a river in the garden with a standing wave that attracts surfers. Here's a picture of them:

Salzburg

2009-08-05T09:20:00.000-04:00

Before I got booted from my office, I took a few days off and met up with a college friend in Munich. We took the train to Salzburg for a day. For all my obsession with visiting Salzburg, it was disappointing. Cute, but the weather was way too hot, and just not very exciting.

Above is the Mirabell Gardens with Festung Hohensalzburg (the city's fortress) rising above it. Behind me is the horse fountain that where the children and Maria sing 'Do Re Mi' in The Sound of Music. In addition to locations for the movie, Salzburg is known as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There's at least two museums devoted to him. This is the Mozart Geburtshaus -- the house he was born in. There's a museum, but it's expensive (7 euros), small, confusing, and not very enlightening. You do get to see some of his hair (yeah, really) and the little violin he played as a child.
After a couple not so successful attempts, we found the path up the hill to the fortress. We didn't go inside, but walked along the hill top from the fortress to Mönchsberg. It was cooler up there. Here you see the fortress, where we started, and some of the hilltop we walked along.
The other side of the Salzbach river and Kapuzinerberg (the hill sticking up from the city).
In addition to Festung Hohensalzburg, there was a lot of small, old, ruin-y fortresses up there.
Two views from the hilltop looking away from the city (i.e., the other side of the hill).

We stayed the night, and the next day, before heading back to Munich, we went to Untersberg. Untersberg is a mountain 16km south of Salzburg (we took the bus there) and over 1900m high. There's a cable car to take you to the summit. It's pretty expensive (21 euros, I think), but actually pretty cool. There's a little peak halfway up the mountain and I think it must be pretty scary to get there and see the ground drop away from you again as you continue up. I was crammed in the middle of the car and didn't see anything, but I heard a few gasps. Going up.
At the top, there's a path to a couple high points, and a sign that indicates that you can walk (90 minutes) all the way to an ice cave. We just sat and had a drink and took pictures.
Vaguely west-ish.
North-ish, you can see Salzburg in this one.
East-ish.
South-ish.
Going down.

Working from Home

2009-08-03T04:52:00.004-04:00

It's 11AM on Monday morning and I'm working from home. And I'll be working from home for a while. They are replacing all the windows at work, meaning that my desk had to be cleaned out, the computer shut down and stored somewhere, and I won't be allowed back into my office for two weeks. (That's right, not only do I not have a place to sit at work, they shut down the computer on my desk too.) The timing is particularly annoying since -- if you didn't know already -- I'm leaving at the end of the month. So, I've cleaned out my desk and mailed 20kg of stuff to the U.S., but in two weeks I'll have to go back to work in an empty office for another two weeks before I leave. Anyway, here's the (very dim) before picture:

Italy - Bologna

2009-07-20T05:29:00.000-04:00

On the last day of the trip, we took the train to Bologna and met up with another friend. He gave us a quick tour of the city (really excellent, so if the astronomy thing doesn't work out...).

This is the Basilica of San Petronio. The building was started in 1390 and completed in 1659, although the facade remains unfinished. Many plans for completing have been proposed but, as our friend remarked, "in typical Italian fashion, nothing's happened." Inside, there's the longest meridian line in the world, 66.8m, calculated and designed by Cassini. A description and photo of it can be found here.

Bologna is notable for all its arcades, allowing pedestrians to walk protected from the (very hot) sun. I didn't get a good picture of them, unfortunately. Bologna is also home to the University of Bologna, the oldest existing university in the Western world (founded in 1088!). Here's a photo of the anatomical theater (which dates to 1637).
The Seven Churches (Santo Stefano) is a collection of four (once seven, hence the name) Medieval churches, interlocked into one big complex. Parts of the church date to the 5th century and it's well worth a look. This photo isn't of the front or any particular part, but the wall caught my eye.
There were once over a hundred towers in Bologna, built by the richest families in Bologna in the 12th and 13th centuries. Many have collapsed or been destroyed. The two towers here are the most famous. The taller one is the Asinelli tower (97m) and the smaller the Garisenda tower (48m). Both of them are crooked. The Garisenda tower once stood 60m, but was lowered when it started to lean dangerously. It's mentioned several times in Dante's Divine Comedy.
After the tour, we had lunch (I had some really excellent melon and prosciutto) and headed to the airport.

And (woo-hoo!), I'm done blogging about Italy just in time to go to Salzburg tomorrow.

Italy - Florence

2009-07-19T06:49:00.014-04:00

A couple random notes on Italy: 1.) Despite my fears and the many horror stories I'd heard, every train we took was more or less on time. 2.) Italy is pretty cool and now I kind of get why it's such a ridiculously popular tourist attraction (kind of). It's too bad that my itinerary wasn't particularly me-friendly since the mountains were full of flowers (and I have allergies), there's tons of cheese (and I'm lactose-intolerant), and I had to ride around in buses through mountainous regions (and I get carsick).

Anyway, on to Florence.
This is the Duomo in Florence. What you're looking at is the Baptistry in the foreground, with the church behind, and Campanile (bell tower) jutting up behind the Baptistry. The giant red dome you see in the back is the largest brick dome ever -- created by Brunelleschi, completed in 1436 -- and the thing to do is to climb the stairs between the inside dome and the outside dome all the way to the top (not a great picture).
It costs 8 euros and there are some 460 steps. That's only 80 more than in Corniglia, so we scoffed at the signs warning that there is no lift. We were right to scoff; it was pretty easy.

Here's the fresco on the inside of the dome.
On the way up, you stop at the lower balcony, below the stained glass windows, while on the way down, you stop at the upper balcony.

Here's one of the balconies:
Looking down from one of the balconies:
From the top balcony, looking across
and looking up.

A little aside: inside the cathedral (and every cathedral), bare shoulders are a no-no. At the Milano Duomo, women sold cheap shawls right outside. Here, they gave out hospital gown-stype paper ponchos:

The top of the dome had some pretty good views. To the front of the cathedral and now you can see actually see the bell tower.
The big church in the middle is Santa Croce, which we visited the next day.
The large tower to the right is Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall. To the right of it (the three arches) is the Uffizi. The Uffizi is right next to the Arno River, so the green hills you see in the background are across it.

After climbing the dome, I was pretty hot and thirsty, so I got a granita from an ice cream place across the street. As we were standing and eating/drinking, a gypsy woman came up to us to beg. I guess she didn't like my response because she ripped the cup out of my hands (and I had a firm grip on it!) and walked away. We just stared in shock. I was basically done with it, though, and already thinking of where to dispose of it, so thanks random gypsy woman, I guess.

On the way back to the hotel that evening we saw these sidewalk chalk artists working.

The next day, we got up early to go to the Uffizi. Since we hadn't reserved tickets weeks in advance (as every guide book will suggest), we were somewhat nervous about waiting in line for hours for nothing. The museum is supposed to open at 9AM. We got there at 8:45AM to find signs saying that due to a staff meeting, the museum would open at 10:30AM. The without-reservations line was probably about 100 at that time. If the museum had opened at the usual time, we probably could have been inside within an hour. We could have left and come back, of course, but the line would have continued to grow while we were gone (and I'd guess that maybe only 20% of the people in line realized that the museum would not open on time). So, in the end, we waited. And by the time, we made it into the museum, we had waited for 3 hours (yikes!).
The most famous pieces are probably Botticelli's The Primavera and The Birth of Venus. This work is also in the collection, although in a room so dim it was nearly impossible to see. We got the audio guides but found them rather disappointingly unenlightening.

The Uffizi is near Ponte Vecchio, a Medieval bridge crossing the Arno with shops built onto it. All the shops are jewelry stores. I took this picture from inside the museum, I think.
For tiny streets, there's a tiny public bus:

Afterwards, we went to the Basilica of Santa Croce.
They had a really cool audio guide (totally worth it), although we got there kind of late and had only time to hear the highlights. They were restoring parts of the church and here you can see them working on it as tourists wander past.
Santa Croce holds the tombs of many famous Italians, such as Rossini,
Michelangelo,
Galileo,
and Dante.
Afterwards, we crossed the river and went up Piazzale Michelangelo. Even though it's basically a parking lot with some benches and a railing, I guess it's known as the place to be because it was full of tourists and people hawking knock-off handbags. (We heard about it from another tourist in the line at the Uffizi. He warned us about the 'many, many steps' to get up there. Pshaw.) The views were excellent. In this one, you see the old city wall to the left, the Boboli Gardens behind that, then down the river to the west, with the Ponte Vecchio the first bridge you see.
And here's the view in another direction, lookin across the river, where the Ponte Vecchio is out of the frame to the left of the photo. Coming down from the hilltop, I took this photo crossing the river at sunset.

Italy - Cinque Terre

2009-07-12T09:42:00.021-04:00

Cinque Terre is in the Italian Riveria and consists of five villages:

Riomaggiore:

Manarola:

Corniglia:

Vernazza:

Monterosso al Mare:
We stayed in Manarola. Here's the lemon tree garden in the back of the hotel:

And here's the view from Manarola. In the distance you can see a bit of the hiking paths that go from village to village. In the foreground, you can see a small swimming area. I took a quick dip there (never been in the Mediterranean before).

Cinque Terre is a fairly popular tourist desination and the thing to do is hike between villages and enjoy the scenery (if walking isn't your thing, you can also take the train or a ferry). By the way, you need to buy a ticket to access the trails. Our first day there, we walked the Via Dell'Amore to Riomaggiore. This is the easiest path -- 20 minutes, flat, well-paved. Then, we walked back and went the other way, to Corniglia, which probably took an hour.

A little bridge on the path!

One stretch of the path ran through a row of abandoned one-room shacks. What the shacks were for, who would want to live there, I have no idea.

These cool flowers were everywhere. It's hard to tell, but the 'petals' are just like leaves.

When you get to Corniglia, you have to climb some 380 steps to get up to the village at the top of the cliff.

The second day, we took the train to Vernazza.

I thought Vernazza was maybe the nicest of the villages. It has a little beach (there's a (larger) beach at Monterosso too, but it's much more beach resort-y there). And we wandered steep, little streets with stairs, like this,

up to this castle (you could even climb to the top of the very narrow tower),

which had some nice views. I think I took this picture of the ferry from there.

From Vernazza, we took what is supposedly the most difficult trail to Monterosso (then took the ferry all the way back to Manarola where we had the best gelato ever). The trail was probably 2 hours and has a lot of steps at the beginning and the end. Here you can see the trail ahead of me along the mountainside:

And, as I mentioned, stairs:

The trail, while not super tough, was definitely more rustic. At places, it was very narrow and basically consisted of the top of the retaining wall for the mountainside terraces.

Italy - Cogne

2009-07-10T04:07:00.001-04:00

As I alluded to before, getting to Cogne from Milan required a subway ride followed by two bus rides up into the mountains. Before I left Germany, I was very worried about the possibility of getting motion sick while riding a bus through mountain switchbacks. So I went to the pharmacy and, after some confusion on the difference between 'motion' and 'emotion,' the lady there gave me antiemetic gum. Her instructions were to start chewing up to 30 minutes between getting on the bus and to chew no more than 3 pieces at a time. Here's a picture I took out the window of the bus, but, believe me, the gum story gets better after the jump.

The first leg of the bus trip was from Milan to Aosta, the main city in the Valle d'Aosta. I popped in a piece of gum when the bus started moving. Within 4 minutes, my entire mouth from my lips to my throat was numb. That, understandably, totally freaked me out. I spit out the gum, then spent several long moments trying to decide whether my throat was swelling closed and whether it was overly silly to 1.) do nothing or 2.) to raise some sort of alarm. I did decide that my tongue wasn't swollen at least, then promptly passed out. 20 minutes later, I woke up, feeling totally normal and undrugged. I put the package of gum away. Here are a couple more pictures from the bus.

Cogne, itself, is a very small town. And I suppose that summer is the low season, as I saw lots of nearly empty, mostly shuttered vacation rentals. Here's the view out my hotel window.

And the view back to the hotel (the main part of town was more densely populated with buildings.

The conference excursion was to Forte di Bard -- a 19th century fortress.

An aside: did you notice that gorgeous field outside my hotel window? There were ones like it all over -- full of wildflowers -- but I noticed on the bus ride that many were watered by sprinkler (I guess to keep them tourist-ready!).

Here's the outside of Forte di Bard:

The tour of the fort was fairly underwhelming, but the view was nice:

And I got a photo of the stone roofs you see in this area:

Here's a random picture I took on the way to the dinner:

On the last full day, some of us went on a short hike to Lillaz (a nearby village) to see the waterfall there. On the way:

Look at all those gorgeous fields and wildflowers. Unfortunately, for all my worries about motion sickness, it never occurred to me that I might be allergic to the Alps. I sneezed constantly. The waterfall:

On the way back:

I like how the tree sprouts horizontally from the slope:
There's water running everywhere in the Alps. Here is a stream running down the mountain. Right next to where I took this photo was a small wall with a spout and water running out. The sign -- in Italian -- said it was okay to drink. I tried it: it was very cold.

Cupcake Digression

2009-07-07T12:12:00.015-04:00

Today is my birthday. In the German tradition, this means that I bring the cake. After a discussion a few weeks ago about the difference between muffins and cupcakes, I decided to make red velvet cupcakes with icing based using this and this recipe from the New York Times. I've never baked anything that wasn't brownies out of the box in my life. But I figured that most of the baking horror stories you hear about are because people are bad and reading and following instructions. I am very good at that.

Now, with no baking experience, shopping for ingredients would be baffling in the U.S. With the added twist of finding the German equivalent, it was basically a day-long chore. Go to store 1, look at shelves. Go home, Google. Go back, buy. Repeat with as many stores as necessary to find all the ingredients. Some things I've learned:

Cake flour = Weizenmehl Type 405 (No surprise, flour types are strictly regulated in Germany. Type 405 is the most popular, but there seems to be no equivalent of American "all-purpose flour." The other flour types seemed more suited to different kinds of bread.)

Canola oil = Rapsöl (Rapeseed oil)

Baking soda = Natron (and they don't sell boxes, just tiny packets, unless you go to an Asian grocery)

white vinegar = Essig (Essig means 'vinegar,' of course, but I guess the default is 'white.')

Vanilla extract is difficult to find in Germany. In general, I hear they use vanilla sugar to flavor. In the grocery stores, you'll find a light colored liquid labeled something like 'vanilla aroma.' It's not the right thing. I did find some vanilla extract in the basement grocery store of Galeria Kaufhof (a German dept. store), where they stock a lot of international stuff.

Food coloring isn't the same as in the U.S. The only kind I could find was less concentrated although thicker in consistency.

Unsweetened cocoa was also tricky. For one, I couldn't find anything but 'Nederland Kakao' in the baking aisle (which I presumed was Dutch processed). I looked at the chocolate drinks aisle (they're more popular than in the U.S.) and found something that looked promising.

I borrowed someone else's kitchen to do the baking (I don't have an oven!) and used some tools that I never had even when I lived back in States: an electric mixer, a sifter, a whisk (I don't think I even owned a whisk). Despite some difficulties with the baking times (the oven didn't really work properly), the cupcakes turned out pretty good -- maybe a little dry but not over or underdone -- and the frosting (despite being just fat upon fat) was quite light and yummy.

In total, following the recipes exactly produced 37 German-sized cupcakes (they looked fairly similarly sized, but I'm not sure how my cups compared to American ones) and maybe not quite twice as much, at least 1/3 more even if you love frosting, than the amount of frosting necessary (doh, oh well). Yay, cupcakes!

Unrelatedly to cupcakes, some friends got me flowers for my birthday. Wasn't that sweet?

Italy - Milan

2009-07-04T17:38:00.017-04:00

I'm back from Italy and armed with tons of pictures (seriously a ton, be prepare to wade through a lot). The plan is to do a post for each stop on my trip, but it may take a while to sort through all my photos and write it all up. First up, Milan.

The motivation for the trip was a week-long workshop in Cogne, in Valle d'Aosta, up in the Alps near the French and Swiss borders. Getting there meant that a friend and I had to fly to Milan. We left a day early and got in 1 1/2 days of sightseeing before heading to the conference. With no guide book (we only had a guide book for Florence at the end of our trip), the only things I knew were in Milan were da Vinci's The Last Supper (which requires a reservation months in advance to see) and the Duomo of Milan.

The Duomo is the fourth largest church in the world (according to Wikipedia). Here's the back:

Here you can see it from across the plaza:

And the inside:

A trip to the tourist information office gave us a few ideas of other things to see. The Basilica of San Lorenzo has some cool things about it.

For one, outside of the church is the Colonne di San Lorenzo, a row of Roman columns marking off the church from the street. The street, however, is tiny (one lane) and, across it, it just looks like an ordinary street in Milan.

Inside, in the Chapel of Saint Aquilino, there are 4th century mosaics. This one shows "Christ the Lawgiver."

And stairs going below the chapel show the old Roman foundations:

The Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio was built by St. Ambrose in 379-386, although it's current appearance dates to 1099 (Wikipedia again).

Inside the courtyard, the walls were embedded with what I assume are remnants from the older building.

We were there on a Saturday and it was a little odd because there were plenty of tourists around at the same time that there was a wedding being performed inside. After the wedding was over, I wandered inside where -- after a few minutes -- I noticed an odd uptick in the number of wedding guests (yes, another wedding was about to start).

Our last stop of the day was Castello Sforzesco. Currently, it houses a bunch of museums, but since we had arrived late, all we did was wander around and take pictures. I tried to capture how big it is, but it was tough.

In front, was a big park.

The following morning, before hopping on the subway (followed by a bus, followed by another bus), we went to the Teatro alla Scala, one of the most famous opera houses in the world. In fact, they had performed Aida the night before. For 5 euros, you can go to the museum, the highlight of which is, of course, the chance to stand in the balcony of the opera house for a few minutes. A display of costumes from different productions, some dating to the 19th century and including several different productions of Aida in different decades, was also pretty neat.

Busy Panicking

2009-06-12T11:07:00.003-04:00

I'm heading out for a conference in exactly a week and am still trying to get the code for the project I'm going to talk about to run in a time span smaller than the age of the Universe. Anyway, to keep you last die-hards who've been checking in here amused while I'm out of town (and taking picture for the blog, I promise!), here is a link to "The Big Picture" blog at boston.com.

"The Big Picture" really should be the most popular site on the internet. It's brilliant in its simplicity. Entries (updated several times a week) present a collection of photos culled from various sources on a theme -- sometimes based on events in the news, but not always. The photos are high resolution and well-sized for one single photo to fill your browser screen (no annoying slideshows). They also look amazing. Here is a neat entry on photos of the Earth from space. Here is another on Antarctica featuring some photos from former fellow U. of C. grad student, Keith Vanderlinde.

Eurovision 2009

2009-05-22T15:55:00.007-04:00

The Eurovision Song Contest finals were last Saturday. Although I've blogged about Eurovision before, the dearth of bloggable material suggests to me that one more post can't hurt.

Everything I want to say has probably been said more succinctly here at the Onion AV club. While I only caught 1/3 of the acts, overall, my impression was that the contest wasn't as fun as in 2007 -- the last time I watched/blogged it. Possibly, the more outrageous (and, therefore, more entertaining) of acts get weeded out in the semi-finals. I, again, missed some of the first acts, but here are my thoughts with accompanying YouTube vidoes.

The winners:

1st place, Norway. The friend who watched the show with me was a fan and it was the winner by far, but I can't say I agree. As far as Eurovision goes, however, at least respectable.

2nd place, Iceland. I missed this song during the live broadcast. Listening now -- boring but not embarrassing. Could actually be something you'd hear on the radio. The dolphins are kind of stupid.

3rd place, Azerbaijian. Huh. While they were tallying up the results, I was thinking that Azerbaijian was a different song, so clearly it didn't make that big of an impression.

Others:

Albania. Seriously, dancing mimes? And I'm not even going to touch the issue of the green dancing guy. I have no words for the confusion this song causes me.

Sweden. I've never seen an act do the pop-song/opera thing successfully. This is no exception.

Greece. I like the way the platform rises at the end to reveal a Greek flag.

Bosnia & Herzegovina. The costumes, the costumes! Even though I linked it before, I must quote the AV Club: "Without Eurovision, you might never have known that the look in Bosnia right now is very touring-production-of-Les-Miz."

Malta. This was my friend's second-favorite. She has a nice voice.

Estonia. When I watched live, we missed her playing the violin she holds for the entire song. I counted, and she plays for exactly 10 seconds at 2:35.

Romania. I cannot understand what she's singing (it is in English, I think), but it nearly has a hook and in terms of disposable summer pop song with hot dancing girls, I don't see how this 19th place is worse than 4th place Turkey.

Turkey. 4th place.

UK. The UK got tired of their terrible showing (see their hilariously ridiculous 2007 entry!), so they got Andrew Lloyd Webber to compose a song for them. It did much better and it's terribly boring.

Finland. Finnish rapping (in English).

Pretty Purple Flower Tree

2009-04-21T11:07:00.003-04:00

As long as I'm blogging about flowers, I figure I should throw up pictures of this.

I can see two of these trees (what kind of tree is it?) on the grounds of the botanical garden behind Poppelsdorfer Schloss. They're gorgeous.

Where Does the Time Go?

2009-04-20T10:43:00.004-04:00

It's been far too long since my last blog post. But it feels like yesterday it was winter and today it is summer. I haven't got a lot of bloggable stuff (although if you are patient, I'm going to Italy at the end of June) but on the recommendation of one of the students I took my bike down Heerstraße on Sunday and went back to take some pictures today. If I had made it there the weekend before, I'm sure the trees would have been full of giant bunches of flowers and no leaves. That would have been impressive. Still, the piles of falling and fallen petals was pretty neat -- reminiscent of the cherry blossoms in Tokyo, but bright pink and on a small street in Germany.

Look how pink the street is.

And this car is.

And all the piles are ... well, you get the idea.

I tried to get a shot of the petals flying and landing on me, but my camera wasn't cooperative.

These are the same trees I blogged about here, but those trees were little and I didn't realize there was a whole street full of mature trees just across the train tracks.

If anyone knows what kind of tree this is, let me know.

Trier

2009-03-29T09:08:00.017-04:00

On Tuesday, we went to Trier (wikipedia here and here). Trier is one of the oldest cities in Germany, founded in 15 BC. With a lot of history, there are a lot of sights to see. I was most interested in -- and we focused on -- the Roman stuff. Actually, I was ridiculously excited about Trier and worried that it wouldn't be as cool as I hoped. In fact, it was cooler.

This is the Porta Nigra, the "black gate." Built between 180 and 200 AD, it is essentially two towers with a narrow courtyard between two sets of gates. In the Middle Ages, the gates were saved from disrepair when it was incorporated into a church (they took down the church later).

Somewhat embarrassing personal aside: Before my trip, the presence of the Porta Nigra was the only thing I knew about Trier and the only thing on my 'must see' list. This is probably not in small part because this is the logo of the high school I went to.

The other side of the gate:
Looking up from between the gates:
Looking down from the upper floors:
Looking across:
Inside one of the towers:
The view south to the Hauptmarkt (the tower is the church in the Hauptmarkt):

Just east of the Hauptmarkt is the Dom. Standing outside, my friends were unimpressed but changed their minds after seeing the interior.

A little south of the Dom is the Konstantinbasilika built in 310 AD. It was the throne hall of Constantine and its dimensions are 67m long, 36m high (11(?) stories!). It was part of the prince-electors' residence and now it is a Protestant church.

Attached to the south side of the basilika is the rest of the prince-electors' residence.

The Kaiserthermen (Imperial Baths) built in the 4th century AD are just south of the basilika. I should mention that all the Roman things we visited charged 2.10 euros for entry, and we bought a discount card for all of them for 6.20 euros (saving us 2 euros!). Okay, I don't know how the baths were organized or the history (Googling suggests that they were never finished), but this was the coolest place (possibly ever).

On one side was the remnants of the building.

On the far side, a lawn. In the middle, there were a maze of paths on the surface and tunnels just below to explore.
Here you can see some students (there aren't a lot of tourists in Trier in March) heading down.
Heading toward that dark hall.
Underneath, the halls are lit by tiny skylights ...
which you can see on the grass.

We also went to the Amphitheater.

The stairs in the center allow tourists to see the rooms underneath.

The Viehmarktthermen were discovered during construction of a parking garage. They built a big glass cube over it.

Here the remains of monastery (back) that lies over the Roman ruins (wall in foreground).

Unfortunately, we only had the one day there. There were sights that we didn't get to and definitely we could have spent more time at the ones we did see. We had dinner in Trier at a restaurant that advertised recipes inspired by a 2000-year-old cookbook discovered during excavations. I noticed that we were the only ones in the restaurant eating the "Roman" fare. But it wasn't bad.

Marksburg Castle

2009-03-28T13:03:00.011-04:00

With some friends visiting, I took Monday off, and we went to Marksburg Castle. A little south of Koblenz in Braubach, the castle advertises as "the only hill castle on the Rhine that has never been destroyed." The oldest parts of the castle date to the 12th century and it's rather awesomely medieval-y.

You have to take the tour to see the castle, but -- unlike a lot of other castles on the Rhine -- it's open year round. In general, the tour is German-only (with an information sheet offered in several different languages). A lot of English speakers happened to show up when we were there and the tour guide very kindly did the tour in both English and German. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to take a lot of pictures.

The Riders' Stairway (ride your horse into the castle and straight to the stable):

Old cannons:

The walls are incredibly thick. My information sheet says 4.5m, although I thought the tour guide said 3.5m. At points, they cut into the walls to make window alcoves. This also meant that it was pretty dim inside and not so good for taking pictures.

This is the great banqueting hall. It's pretty small (maybe the size of my 40 square meter apartment). That door leads to the bathroom. In typical medieval castle style, the toilet hangs over the outside of the castle walls so the waste drops outside. The door wasn't for privacy. It was never closed unless the castle was under attack. Then, it was locked to prevent enemy soldiers from climbing the castle walls and into the castle through the toilet.

There was a lot of other cool stuff like a collection of armor from 600 BC to 1500 AD, the torture chamber, and the tiny stone stairway that was designed to be too small for invading soldiers to draw their swords.

There's a ton of castles on the Rhine. Here's a picture of what I think is a fortress right above the Koblenz train station.

Tübingen

2009-03-05T07:49:00.014-05:00

Tübingen is the adorable little town that Sean has been looking for in Germany. Bonn is too big, too modern. Heidelberg has a nice castle, but is a tourist trap. This is what wikipedia says about the charms of Tübingen: "The highlights of Tübingen include its crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow-stair alleyways picking their way through the hilly terrain, streets lined with canals and well-maintained traditional half-timbered houses."

Cute little street:

Bridge to building (not the cutest one, a couple of planks which crossed a tiny canal to what can only be described as a hobbit-sized door):

Fachwerkhaus with lots of different dates on it and some sort of clock:

Rathaus with astronomical clock:

Markt am Rathaus:

We stayed at a hotel down the street from Schloß Hohentübingen. Here's the entrance to the Schloß:

We took an excursion (conference excursion) to Hohenzollern Castle, a 40 minute drive away. Here's an awesome day/night picture of it.

From afar:

It's a pretty steep climb to the top. The view:

The coiled path (through many gates) to the top:

The chapel and some of the central courtyard:

We took a pretty cool tour, which did not, however, explain this statue:

Then, it snowed.

In Bruges

2009-02-24T06:38:00.012-05:00

Sean and I were in Brussels for the weekend and took a day trip to Bruges. You know, this place:

(Other cool bits to watch are here and here.)

Bruges is in the Flemish part of Belgium and features a lot of medieval buildings. Sean and I were rather lackadaisical about the sightseeing, just walking around, going up to the top of the belfry and taking a boat tour through the canals.

The Belfry:

From the top of the belfry:

On the boat:

Basilica of the Holy Blood:

Turning German

2009-02-16T06:56:00.004-05:00

The cord on my MacBook power adapter melted some time last night. After exhausting all the possibilities that didn't involve riding my bike in the rain to the German Apple Store equivalent, I did just that and got a new power adapter. So over two years after I moved to Germany and a mere 8 months before the end of my job contract, my MacBook now has European power plugs. I'm sure they are going to come in handy in the U.S.

This, of course, was the (inappropriate and inaccurate) song I was humming on the way back to my apartment:

Not useful for my mix.

Make a Mix for Me

2009-02-14T16:39:00.017-05:00

What I really need to power through the next month or next few months is the right playlist. I'm thinking indie-electropop-dance, if I actually knew what that meant. So I'm throwing down the gauntlet: make a mix for me. I'll even get it started:

Ladyhawke - Magic (not an official video, duh):

Matt & Kim - Daylight

[Updated Feb. 17, 2009] Wow, you guys really went to town with the suggestions and I just spent an absurd amount of time clicking around youtube. So I'm going to keep this post updated with songs that piqued my interest. And I'll throw a couple songs on at the end that people can voice their opinion on. With the abundance of cool (and totally new to me) songs, I'm thinking that I'm straying from my original concept, but I guess you got to go where the road takes you.

Songs based on suggestions:

Alphabeat - Boyfriend (slick cheesy 80s pop song, but too slick?)

Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes

Parts & Labor - Nowheres Nigh

[Updated Feb. 20, 2009] Okay, still processing all the suggestions, but I thought I'd throw up one more song. I also added some comments about songs already posted. Then, for kicks, Yaz: doesn't fit on my playlist, but I enjoy the nostalgia.

Bloc Party - Banquet

Catchy or annoying?

MGMT - Kids (current verdict: annoying, but insidious)

Yeasayer - 2080 (current verdict: not annoying, but not sufficiently danceable)

Yaz

Only You

Bad Connection (how could anyone resist this?)

Totally irrelevant to the task at hand, but as long as I'm embedding videos

Amanda Palmer - Oasis

Construction

2009-02-09T05:33:00.005-05:00

Today marks the beginning of a month-long construction project in the hallway right outside my office door. I can see them moving equipment into place already and I'm getting nervous. When they're set up, the only access to my office will be through the stairwell and through the construction zone (through possibly some sort of dust containment zone). Fantastic.

The plan is to install fire doors that will automatically close when smoke is detected. This is a long delayed and very important project given the current state of fire safety in this building. For one, all the fire doors to the stairwell are continuously propped open -- i.e., not so useful in a fire. But that's the kind of situation you find in buildings everywhere. The far more entertaining (and blogworthy) situation is that there are no fire alarms. Period. There is one button in the stairwell on the third floor. I have no idea what it does. What it doesn't do is set off audible alarms in the building to warn people. I know this because there are no speakers anywhere. Instead, on every floor there is a big locked box (opened by any building key). Inside this box is ... a megaphone. That's right, a megaphone. Hilarious.

Very Lazy Blogger

2009-01-11T07:56:00.003-05:00

My last post was over a month ago ... how mortifying. Since then, I spent 3.5 weeks in the U.S. (didn't blog about that) and returned to Germany where unbelievably there's snow on the ground and the temperatures were below freezing for a week (took no photos and did not blog about that either). I'll get my act together eventually (I have high hopes for February through April).

In the meantime, a question. Should I try to watch and keep up with Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse? Presumably, I have the time, and the technological/geographic difficulties can be worked out one way or another. I predicted correctly that Joss's last television show would have a quick and ignominious death and didn't watch it until several years later. The newest one doesn't scream 'cancellation' quite as hard, but still it's hard to be optimistic.

[Updated 7:12 PM] There is an old post entitled 'Lazy Blogger' (LB). I changed the title of this post from 'Extremely Lazy Blogger' (ELB) to 'Very Lazy Blogger' (VLB), so I could reserve ELB and maybe EVLB for the future. Dorky or brilliant? You decide.

Munich

2008-12-06T04:31:00.012-05:00

I went to Munich last weekend to visit a friend. Here's the two-day tour.

On Saturday, we went to the center of town to see the Residenz. Right outside we saw the Theatinerkirche and Feldherrnhalle. The Residenz is a ginormous palace that housed Bavarian rulers from 1385 to 1918 (thanks Lonely Planet!). There are over 100 rooms open to the public. It's pretty ridiculous (and maze-like!) and we were tired of it way before we ran out of rooms to look at.

When we finally stumbled back out, we went to Marienplatz, the center of the Altstadt. Here's view of the Neues Rathaus from the Christmas market.

This being Germany in December, there was a Christmas market at the Residenz and another a few blocks away at Marienplatz. This one, however, was packed. Random aside: In Bonn, a Christmas market is called a Weihnachtsmarkt. In Munich, it's Christkindlmarkt.

We went to a late lunch at what Googling suggests was Weisses Brauhaus. They serve Schneider Bier (yum), and for what must be a very touristy place seemed remarkably German. We mostly wandered from Christmas market to Christmas market for the afternoon and had very yummy Indian food for dinner.

On Sunday, we had somewhat greater tourist aspirations. In the morning, we went to Nymphenburg. On the walk from the train, we saw this car and had to take a picture of it.

Schloss Nymphenburg is ginormous. Here's the front of the main building.

But turning around, you can see that the outer building (the yellow ones) are very very far away. Behind the main building, the grounds and gardens are also huge.

Unlike the Residenz, there are only something like 20 rooms to view. The most impressive is the first you see.

One of the most famous rooms currently houses the Gallery of Beauties, a collection of 36 portraits of women whom Ludwig I (1786-1868) considered beautiful. According to the sign in the room, the collection has always been open to the public (classy!) and includes portraits of a shoemaker's daughter and Lola Montez, Ludwig's mistress. There is an incredibly entertaining (but probably half apocryphal) bio of her in my friend's Lonely Planet.

In the afternoon, we went to Dachau. It's a 20 minute train ride from the center of town.

The gate:

Wall and guard tower:

One set of barracks has been reconstructed:

A museum has been installed in the maintenance building and in the back there are several churches and the crematorium.

After, we went back to Marienplatz and had some glühwein. It is remarkably good and good for keeping you warm even though you (and many, many others) are idiotically standing outside in the cold.